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Sunday, Oct. 19, 2008

Obama pulls huge crowds in Missouri

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Democrat Barack Obama turned out enormous crowds at his two stops in battleground Missouri on Saturday in what campaign aides said was a strategy of using his ability to command huge crowds as a way to build excitement heading into the final two weeks of the presidential campaign.

An estimated 100,000 people showed up in St. Louis Saturday morning to hear Obama speak at the Gateway Arch — the largest crowd ever to hear Obama in the United States.

Saturday evening, a crowd estimated at more than 75,000 thronged the Liberty Memorial near downtown Kansas City for an Obama rally.

With just 17 days to go before the election, campaign aides said they hope to turn out comparable crowds in other battleground states.

"This is the home stretch, and our primary goal is to capture the excitement and energy that's surrounded this race," said Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki. To turn out large crowds, the campaign is choosing outdoor venues with virtually unlimited capacity.

Good weather — like Saturday's in Missouri — helps. Meanwhile, volunteers in dozens of Obama field offices in each of the battleground states are tapping phone and e-mail lists to urge his supporters to turn out for the weekend rallies.

Republican John McCain also campaigned in two hotly contested states — North Carolina and Virginia — where the crowds were smaller, but the rhetoric was heated.

McCain used words such as welfare and socialism to describe Obama's plans to raise taxes on businesses and Americans earning more than $250,000 and redistribute that in the form of cuts and credits to 95 percent of working families.

"Since you can't reduce taxes on those who pay zero, the government will write them all checks called a tax credit," McCain told a crowd estimated at 7,000 people, in Concord, N.C., criticizing Obama's plan. "And the Treasury will cover those checks by taxing other people."

In a Saturday morning radio address, McCain concluded that Obama's plan would turn the Internal Revenue Service into "a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington."

Obama adopted new rhetoric, saying McCain's plans to continue President Bush's tax cuts amounted to corporate welfare and reflected his values.

"It comes down to values," Obama said. "In America, do we simply value wealth, or do we value the work that creates it?"

Obama said McCain "is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people 'welfare.' The only 'welfare' in this campaign is John McCain's plan to give another $200 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest corporations in America — including $4 billion in tax breaks to big oil companies that ran up record profits under George Bush."

The only larger Obama event was the international audience of roughly 200,000 that turned out during Obama's summer visit to Berlin where he spoke about foreign policy.

"All I can say is, 'Wow,'" Obama said as he surveyed the crowd gathered at the edge of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, underneath the nation's tallest monument.