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On the trail: Bill Clinton to sit out Jewish holidays

September 25, 2008

Former President Bill Clinton said yesterday he would head back to the campaign trail for Barack Obama in Florida once the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which he's not known to observe, were over. "I intend to go to Florida, to Ohio, to northeast Pennsylvania, and to Nevada, at a minimum," he told CNN's "Larry King Live." "I may do events in Arkansas, depending on what the Democratic Party does down there. And I've agreed to do some fundraising for them in California and New York." "Are you kind of feeling Jewish that you're waiting until after the Jewish holidays?" King asked, to a CNN transcript shows. "No. But I think it would be - if we're trying to win in Florida, it may be that," Clinton began, before discussing his real Florida target: "You know, they think that because of who I am and where my politic[al] base has traditionally been, they may want me to go sort of hustle up what Lawton Chiles used to call the 'cracker vote' there," he said.

Officials of a small Christian university in Newberg, Ore., say a life-size cardboard reproduction of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was hung from a tree on the campus, an act with racial undertones that outraged students and school leaders alike. George Fox University president Robin Baker said a custodian discovered the effigy early Tuesday and removed it. University spokesman Rob Felton said yesterday that the commercially produced reproduction had been suspended from the branch of a tree with fishing line around the neck. Taped to the cardboard cutout of the black senator from Illinois was a message targeting participants in Act Six, a scholarship program geared toward increasing the number of minority and low-income students at several Christian colleges, mostly in the Northwest. The message read, "Act Six reject."

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden questioned John McCain's judgment to be commander in chief yesterday, arguing the Republican presidential candidate would keep digging the United States into a hole of isolation and insecurity. "Nothing is more important than judgment," Biden said in his remarks. "But time and again, on the most critical national security issues of our time, John McCain's judgment was wrong." The speech offered some of the Obama campaign's strongest criticism to date about McCain's leadership abilities. It was scheduled two days before the first presidential debate, which will focus on foreign policy, and was billed by the campaign as a major speech on foreign policy by the veteran chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.