READING, PA. — The Democratic candidates for president spent Sunday making 11th-hour appeals to Pennsylvania voters in anticipation of Tuesday’s primary and renewing their attacks against each other.
Making what he called his “closing argument,” Sen. Barack Obama described rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as disingenuous for revising positions to suit the tastes of voters.
Clinton, for her part, suggested that Obama, and not she, had been clouding the last days of campaigning with negativity, and she then launched a series of attacks against the Illinois senator.
Pennsylvania’s primary is Tuesday, and a strong showing by Obama — victory or narrow defeat — could put added pressure on Clinton to drop out of the race.
Polls show Clinton leading in Pennsylvania by about 5 percentage points Obama called his Democratic rival a “tenacious” candidate Sunday, but he said she was a product of a flawed political system she had no ability to change.
“Her basic view about this election is that the ‘say anything, do anything’ special-interest-driven politics in Washington is how it’s got to be,” Obama said. “That’s how the game is played. And so you should elect her to be the nominee because she has been in Washington longer and she knows how to play the game better…. That’s the argument.” Obama spoke in a high-school gymnasium here before an enthusiastic crowd of about 2,600 people.
Obama faulted Clinton for taking what he described as conflicting positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement. She backed it when her husband was president, Obama said, but distanced herself while campaigning in states where the agreement is unpopular.
In a similar vein, Obama said she initially supported the Iraq war but changed her stance when it began to go sour.
He said, “what you can’t do is you can’t spend a whole bunch of time campaigning on behalf of your husband’s NAFTA proposal and then when you’re running for president go around Pennsylvania saying you’re opposed to NAFTA. You can’t do that!” He added: “You can’t say that you’re for the war when it’s politically popular to be for the war and then, when it becomes unpopular, suddenly you say, ‘I didn’t really vote for the war, I voted for diplomacy.’ “The point is, if we’re going to bring about real change, we have to be honest with the American people about how that change comes about.” He took questions after his speech, including one about former President Carter’s recent meeting with Hamas leaders. Obama called the meeting a mistake.
“Hamas is not a state, and it has not denounced terrorism. It has not recognized Israel’s right to exist. It has not recognized previous agreements made between the Israelis and Palestinians.
“It’s very hard for us to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians if a certain portion of your actors … don’t even recognize the people on the other side of the table as being able to stay there.” .
In a whirlwind charge across Pennsylvania on Sunday, Clinton spoke to a crowd of about 1,000 people packed into the Liberty High School gym in Bethlehem, Pa.
“This week we had a debate, and it showed you the choice you have,” she said. “No wonder that my opponent has been so negative in these last days, because I think you saw a big difference between us.” She said she offers leadership and experience, and she repeated charges that Obama “says one thing but his campaign does another.” The New York senator made a couple quick jabs at President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying “we just haven’t had leadership in these past seven years,” before quickly returning to criticism of her Democratic rival.
“It’s important to me that this campaign not just be about speeches, the cameras and the lights,” she said, “but about what we can be together.” She then talked of her plans for tax breaks, support for small business and renewable energy investment.
But she again struck out against Obama, denigrating a recent campaign ad in which he says he doesn’t take money from oil companies.
“When I first saw that, I thought, ‘no one takes money from oil companies’ — it’s been illegal for 100 years,” she said.
She added that both candidates, however, take money from people who work for oil companies. When Cheney presented his “pro-oil-company bill,” Clinton said, Obama voted for it; she didn’t.
“I was raised by family to say what I mean and mean what I say,” Clinton said.
