Obama blasts war; Clinton talks finance

GOP candidate John McCain met in London with the prime minister.

COMBINED DISPATCHES

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Barack Obama traveled to economically struggling West Virginia on Thursday to highlight the financial costs of the war in Iraq and to attempt to tie them to hardships at home.

The Illinois senator sought to promote an economics-based argument against the war at a time when the nation is on the brink of recession, if not already in one, and voters are placing a higher priority on economic issues.

The war remains overwhelmingly unpopular among Democratic voters and Obama’s early opposition to the war presents a clearer point of distinction with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton than do their approaches to broad economic issues.

But media attention to Iraq has waned as the level of violence there has dropped significantly during the course of the presidential campaign.

Obama marked the war’s fifth anniversary this week with two days of speeches making a case against the war, first on strategic and then economic grounds. Clinton has not stressed the war in her campaign this week.

Campaigning in Indiana on Thursday, Clinton also focused on hard economic times, offering a dose of financial populism.

The New York senator seized on the $30 billion in loan guarantees the Federal Reserve provided to stave off the bankruptcy of the Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns over the weekend to propose a similar-size $30 billion emergency housing “lifeline” to aid homeowners and communities threatened by foreclosures.

“We’ve seen unprecedented Fed actions over the last several days to address the crisis on Wall Street, but nothing to address the crisis on Main Street,” Clinton told Bloomberg News in a telephone interview.

A battle over Clinton’s record as first lady broke out Thursday, as Obama’s campaign challenged her record on trade.

On Wednesday, the National Archives placed on the public record more than 11,000 pages of Clinton’s daily schedules from 1993 to 2000. Her schedules show her holding at least five meetings in 1993 aimed at helping to win congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Senator Clinton likes to say on the campaign trail that she’s always been a critic of NAFTA,” said Obama supporter Roger Tauss.

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer countered that it is Obama who can’t be trusted.

“Senator Obama said that he would not engage in personal attacks,” said Singer. “Now, after losses in Ohio and Texas, the Obama campaign is explicitly attacking Senator Clinton’s character.”

Singer said independent accounts make clear that Clinton did not support NAFTA and that “she is the candidate Americans can trust to fix it.” Singer referred to previous statements by former White House adviser David Gergen, who said the first lady “was extremely unenthusiastic about NAFTA. And I think that’s putting it mildly.”

Obama, speaking at the University of Charleston, argued that the war in Iraq has contributed to rising gasoline prices as well as a swelling national debt that has weakened the economy. At the same time, he said, the war is draining resources that could be used to better the lives of Americans by expanding access to health care, improving public education and rebuilding roads and bridges.

Republican John McCain, on a weeklong tour of the Middle East and Europe, met in London with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and saluted the contributions British troops have made to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, McCain’s campaign suspended a staffer who sent out links to a video tying Obama with incendiary remarks about white America made by Obama’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The staffer sent out a link to the YouTube video “Is Obama Wright?” on the social networking site Twitter and was suspended a few hours later.