Clinton, Obama urge Americans to get serious

Associated Press

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.

Donald Trump warned Thursday that a cloud of investigation would follow Hillary Clinton into the White House. He evoked the bitter impeachment battle of the 1990s in a closing campaign argument meant to bring wayward Republicans home.

Clinton and her allies, led by President Barack Obama, told voters to get serious about the dangers of Trump.

As polls show Trump closing in on Clinton in key battleground states, her campaign is rushing to shore up support in some long-standing Democratic strongholds. That includes the campaign’s Michigan firewall, a remarkable situation for a candidate who looked to be cruising to an easy win just a week ago.

Clinton’s shrunken lead has given Trump’s campaign hope, one he’s trying to broaden into a breakthrough. That means zeroing in on questions of Clinton’s trustworthiness and a new FBI review of an aide’s emails.

The attack is aimed at appealing to moderate Republicans and independents who have been the holdouts of his campaign, turned off by his behavior but equally repelled by the possible return of the Clintons.

“Here we go again with the Clintons – you remember the impeachment and the problems.” Trump said Thursday at a rally in Jacksonville. “That’s not what we need in our country, folks. We need someone who is ready to go to work.”

Clinton and allies, meanwhile, are seeking to keep the spotlight on Trump, charging that his temperament and his disparaging comments about women and minorities make him unfit for office.

“He has spent this entire campaign offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters,” Clinton said, singling out Trump’s endorsement from the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan and noting he has retweeted messages from white supremacists.

“If Donald Trump were to win this election we would have a commander in chief who is completely out of his depth and whose ideas are incredibly dangerous,” she said at Pitt Community College outside of Greenville, North Carolina.

Clinton campaigned later Thursday with former primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders and pop star Pharrell Williams in Raleigh, where she warned that Trump’s election risked “normalizing discrimination.”

Also in battleground North Carolina, Trump delivered a defense-related speech at a nighttime rally and said he can’t picture Clinton as commander in chief. And he saluted veterans, saying, they are “so much more brave than me. I’m brave in other ways. I’m financially brave, big deal!”

Trump’s path to victory remains narrow. He must win Florida to win the White House, no easy feat. Still, his campaign has been buoyed by tightening polls there and in other key battlegrounds, as well by reports that African-American turnout for Clinton is lagging.

Clinton enlisted Obama’s help urging those voters to the polls and lighting a fire under other Democrats, particularly young people, who share some of the wariness about Clinton. Speaking to students at Florida International University in Miami, Obama said now is the time to get serious about the choice.

“This isn’t a joke. This isn’t ‘Survivor.’ This isn’t ‘The Bachelorette.’” he said, taunting the former reality-TV star. “This counts.”

Relishing one of his last turns on the campaign stage as president, Obama repeatedly returned to his new campaign catchphrase capturing his disbelief in the unpredictable race to replace him.