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Obama talks values to 100,000 in St. Louis

COMBINED NEWS SERVICES

October 19, 2008

ST. LOUIS - Democrat Barack Obama drew his largest U.S. crowd to date yesterday - an estimated 100,000 people who came to hear him speak at the Gateway Arch - as he campaigned in battleground Missouri just 17 days ahead of the election.

Obama adopted new rhetoric, saying rival John McCain's plans to continue President George W. Bush's tax cuts amounted to corporate welfare and reflected the Arizona senator's values.

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

McCain, said Obama, "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."

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) who spoke at the St. Louis rally before Obama took the stage, criticized McCain running mate Sarah Palin's recent suggestion that some parts of the country are more pro-American than others.

Picking up a theme highlighted by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden - who yesterday said he was tired of hearing sections of the country being labeled unpatriotic - McCaskill went on to suggest Palin isn't particularly qualified to be vice president.

McCaskill said McCain's campaign is "mean, angry, personal, petty, small, bogus-attacks" and that "they're scared about the new voters, have you noticed?"

The only larger Obama event held as part of the Illinois senator's White House bid was the international audience of roughly 200,000 that turned out during his summer visit to Berlin where he spoke about foreign policy.

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

Joyce Jones, 62, a local volunteer, said television stations had predicted a turnout of about half the size, or 50,000 people. "It shows that people really want a change," she said.

Another woman in the crowd, Jocelyn Harmon, 44, an auditor, said she isn't involved with the campaign and simply showed up to lend her support to the idea Obama could win Republican-leaning Missouri. "It is history, regardless of who wins," she said.

Meanwhile, senators in opposing political parties have asked McCain to stop the automated phone calls that link Democratic candidate Barack Obama to 1960s radical Bill Ayers. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican and Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, made separate appeals to McCain on Friday. Reid told reporters at a news conference in Las Vegas he's surprised at the "scummy" tactics employed by McCain's presidential campaign and "can't believe John McCain knows what's going on."