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Obama compliments McCain

April 21, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama paid the presumptive Republican nominee a backhanded compliment yesterday.

"Either Democrat would be better than John McCain," he told a Reading, Pa., audience. "And all three of us would be better than George Bush." Hillary Rodham Clinton countered that a McCain presidency would continue Bush's policies.

Also yesterday, McCain called Obama's relationship with former 1960s radical William Ayers "an open question." He said on ABC's "This Week" that Obama had become friends with Ayers and "spent time with him while the guy was unrepentant over his activities as a member of a terrorist organization." Ayers has been quoted as saying, "I don't regret setting bombs" decades ago.

Obama has said Ayers lives in his Chicago neighborhood but that they don't speak regularly.