The New York Times reports Memorial Day "offered at least a preview into the summertime duel between" John McCain and Barack Obama, "who for the first time were campaigning in the same swing state on the same day." As McCain "spoke about the costs and sacrifices of the Iraq war at the Veterans Memorial in Albuquerque, Mr. Obama praised the patriotism of America's soldiers before taking voters' questions - and hearing their frustrations about Iraq and a host of other concerns - at an outdoor forum against the backdrop of the Organ Mountains" in New Mexico.
Fox News Special Report reported, "Though he didn't mention Barack Obama by name, McCain urged veterans and voters to reject Democrats' calls for withdrawal." NBC Nightly News reported, "McCain suggested that he is more willing to take political risks than Obama over a veterans' education bill that McCain claims will discourage re-enlistment. But Obama supports the bill sponsored by Virginia Senator Webb."
ABC World News reported, "On Memorial Day, a day to remember those who have died in uniform, Barack Obama acknowledged that he's never worn the uniform." Sen. Barack Obama: "My grandfather marched in Patton's army. But I cannot know what it's like to walk into battle like so many of you."
CNN's The Situation Room reported McCain "responded to criticism from Democrats, particularly Senator Barack Obama, for opposing a GI bill that would extend education benefits to veterans. He didn't mention Obama by name, but he did refer to fellow veteran Senator Jim Webb, who introduced the bill." McCain: "It would be easier, much easier politically, for me to have joined Senator Webb in offering his legislation."
The Washington Post reports McCain and Obama "made Memorial Day pilgrimages on Monday to this critical swing state, where a closely divided electorate may help determine the outcome of the 2008 battle for the White House." Each is "eager to tilt the state to his their column after a decade in which New Mexico voters have made the state one of the most closely watched in presidential elections." The Los Angeles Times reports Obama and McCain "brought their campaigns to the deserts of the American West on Monday, kicking off what is shaping up to be a fierce contest for the region in November."
McCain Challenges Obama To Visit Iraq The AP reports John McCain "on Monday sharply criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama for not having been to Iraq since 2006, and said they should visit the war zone together." McCain noted that Obama's "last trip to Iraq came before the military buildup that is credited with curbing violence."
The Washington Post reports Hillary Clinton "tried again yesterday to explain her reference last week to Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, while her campaign aides accused Sen. Barack Obama's advisers of taking the comment out of context and exploiting it." Clinton "used the June date to illustrate how long the Democratic race has gone on in past cycles, and she apologized after it caused an immediate furor. But yesterday she said the remarks had been misinterpreted."
NBC Nightly News reported, "In a lengthy editorial in today's 'New York Daily News,' she again brought up her controversial comment about Bobby Kennedy saying she was deeply dismayed and disturbed that it had been misconstrued...to suggest something completely unthinkable." ABC World News reported, "The Clinton camp is also furious about the flap over her remarks about Robert Kennedy's assassination." With Obama "needing her support this fall, today, his chief strategist, tried, publicly, at least, to end the flap."
The New York Times reports Clinton aides "also said that the news media and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama were partly responsible for fanning the flames." Critics "seized on the comments, with some accusing her of suggesting that she was staying in the race because tragedy might strike Mr. Obama."
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The Wall Street Journal reports President Bush and John McCain "will appear together at a fund-raiser in Phoenix Tuesday, the first time in nearly three months that the Republican presidential candidate will be seen beside the man he hopes to succeed." But "with Mr. Bush's popularity at a record low, the McCain campaign has made sure that television footage of the two men together will be minimal. The maneuvering is the latest example of Sen. McCain's aggressive effort to separate himself from the White House, even as he embraces many of the policies that Mr. Bush has promoted throughout his presidency."
CNN's The Situation Room also notes that while the event "was initially planned to be open to cameras at the Phoenix Convention Center, it's been moved to a private residence and is now closed to the media. So, there will only be brief pictures of McCain and the president on an airport tarmac."
The AP reports Hillary Clinton "ended a three-day campaign swing across Puerto Rico the same way many Americans mark Memorial Day - with family, friends and a salute to the sacrifices of military men and women." It is "the Clintons' long history with Puerto Rico - and Hispanic voters in general - that gives Clinton a decided edge in the island's presidential primary on June 1, not to mention that her home state of New York has approximately 1 million Puerto Ricans."
NBC Nightly News reported Clinton's "three day weekend" in Puerto Rico "make her look pretty carefree, but weighing on her mind were her comments on Friday when she reminded an editorial board that Bobby Kennedy's run for the White House ended tragically in June. In a letter to the 'New York Daily News' on Sunday she insisted the media had taken them entirely out of context."
The CBS Evening News reported, "Puerto Ricans can't vote for president in November and only 55 delegates are at stake in its Democratic primary. But Senator Hillary Clinton is embracing the islanders as potential saviors." Fox News Special Report reported, "Hillary Clinton spent a third day campaigning in Puerto Rico ahead of next Sunday's primary, where 55 delegates are at stake. Today she said she will be a commander in chief who will take care of veterans, especially when it comes to medical care."
CNN's The Situation Room reported Clinton "also brought her own family...to remind voters how good her husband's administration had been to the island, providing federal aid following Hurricane George and getting rid of the controversial bombing range in Vieques."
Clinton Faces Difficult Return To Senate The Washington Post reports in a front page story, "Many Democrats are now pointing to the [Sen. Edward] Kennedy model as a path for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to reshape her own political career, assuming she is unable to wrest the nomination from Sen. Barack Obama." Yet Kennedy was "an 18-year Senate veteran who had already risen to chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a health subcommittee. Clinton faces few options for quick advancement should she give up her presidential bid, prompting some to speculate that she may look elsewhere for a prominent political post, possibly the governorship of New York."
Bill Clinton Questions Wife's Media Treatment CNN's The Situation Room reported former President Bill Clinton "says his wife's campaign is not always getting a fair shot, and, this time, it's not a vast right-wing conspiracy that's to blame. Mr. Clinton says every time you turn on the TV, someone is trying to end this race." Clinton "tells voters to ignore calls by -- quote 'people on television' for Hillary Clinton to drop out and says she's been getting a raw deal throughout the campaign." Bill Clinton: "And I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running."
The CBS Evening News reported, "John McCain knows his age could be an issue in the presidential campaign, so today he released more than 1,100 pages of medical documents to demonstrate he's in good health. ... No heart disease. Blood pressure 134 over 84, cholesterol 192. But he's had several bouts with skin cancer and remains at risk."
NBC Nightly News added, "The Senator has endured a number of health challenges, some of them from his Vietnamese captors as a POW, some no doubt as a result of exposure to the Arizona sun. ... Much of the focus for reporters was on senator McCain's skin cancer, he's had almost every kind, including malignant melanoma, the most aggressive and deadly form."
The AP says Sen. McCain "appears cancer-free, has a strong heart and is in generally good health, according to eight years of medical records McCain's presidential campaign made available Friday as it sought to prove that, at 71, he is healthy enough -- and not too old -- to serve as president."
However, according to the Wall Street Journal, "several outside cardiologists not involved in Sen. McCain's care said cholesterol tests and blood-pressure measurements also included in the records suggest his risk of having a heart attack in the next 10 years is at least 17% -- and perhaps a little above 20% -- and they recommend more-aggressive treatment than the senator is getting."
Timing Of Limited Release Noted The New York Times, in a front-page article titled, "McCain's Health Is Called Robust By His Doctors," contends Sen. McCain "chose to release his most recent medical records on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend in what his campaign advisers said was an effort to play down reporting about his cancer surgery. Despite Mr. McCain's favorable report, the advisers have said they do not consider articles about his melanoma as politically helpful and are hopeful that they will attract less notice over the long holiday."
Fox News Special Report reported, "Fox News contributor Karl Rove says Barack Obama has taken a narrow lead in the electoral college vote against John McCain for the first time since March. New polling in Colorado has shifted that state from tossup to Obama, while Wisconsin has changed from McCain lead to tossup. That gives Obama a narrow lead of 235 electoral votes to 233 for McCain with 70 as tossups." But Hillary Clinton "does even better against McCain. She holds steady at 274 electoral votes."
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There are some indications that things in Iraq seem to be going well or at least better than they used to. Yesterday, the website of the Wall Street Journal reported "US and Iraqi military officials said violence in Iraq has decreased significantly in recent weeks to levels not seen in four years." That drop "offers some hope to officials that Iraqi security services may be making gains." US military spokesman Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll "said at a news conference...Sunday that weekly attacks in Iraq are down to March 2004 levels, which were about 300 attacks a week." The Los Angeles Times noted Driscoll "credited the decrease to a series of operations launched by the Iraqi government in the last two months to extend control over parts of the country that have been under the sway of armed Sunni Arab and Shiite militants," including "crackdowns in the southern oil hub of Basra, the northern city of Mosul and the Baghdad district of Sadr City."
AFP and UPI ran similar reports, while the New York Times focused on the loud disputes between Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and the Iraqi government, and noted at the end of the story that "the salvos came as American military officials said the number of overall attacks throughout Iraq had fallen to its lowest weekly level since March 2004. Because some previous declines proved to be short-lived, American officials were cautious."
Also yesterday, the AP said "Al-Qaida fighters and other Sunni insurgents have largely scattered from the northern city of Mosul in the face of a US-Iraqi sweep, fleeing to desert areas further south, an Iraqi commander said Sunday. He vowed the forces will not allow them to regroup." The US military "said al-Qaida in Iraq was 'off-balance and on the run' but remains a very lethal threat, tempering remarks by the US ambassador a day earlier that the terror network was closer than ever to being defeated."
Those developments come after Saturday's remarks by US Amb. Ryan Crocker. According to the AP, Crocker said "that al-Qaida's network in the country has never been closer to defeat, and he praised Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for his moves to rein in Shiite and Sunni militant groups."
In his New York Times column, William Kristol write that "we are on course to win the Iraq war." This "success, if we sustain the will and ability to bring it to fruition, will be an important national achievement. It will be due above all to the remarkable efforts of the men and women of our armed forces. We should stop to thank them -- and to pay tribute to their fallen comrades whom we honor this day."
Media Coverage Of Iraq, Afghan Wars Declines The New York Times reported on Memorial Day, "Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There's plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield." According to the "Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September." A similar story appears in this morning's Christian Science Monitor.
Just as the new GI bill is coming to dominate debate over Iraq war funding, the White House continues to take on media critics. If first it was NBC that suffered the brunt of the Administration's anger, as the AP notes, now the White House is blasting the New York Times editorial page. The Hill was virtually alone among today's newspapers in noting that "the White House on Monday blasted the New York Times for 'irresponsibly distort[ing] President Bush's strong commitment to strengthening and expanding support for America's service members and their families.'" In an editorial on a new GI Bill, "which passed the Senate ahead of recess, and Bush's opposition to the legislation as written, the paper said that 'having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers' lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform.'" The White House reacted quickly and strongly." White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a statement, "This editorial could not be farther from the truth about the president's record of leadership on this issue." She added that the "newspaper's editorial board 'doesn't let the facts get in the way of expressing its vitriolic opinions -- no matter how misleading they may be.'"
The Wall Street Journal reports this morning on "the emergence of the so-called 21st Century GI Bill," which "has thrown an unexpected wrinkle into a broader debate about funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." Democrats in the Senate added the GI measure, written by Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) "to a war-funding bill, hoping to increase the chances of it becoming law. But its inclusion could prompt a veto fight with President Bush."
The Financial Times reports Alan Greenspan said in an interview the US "is still more likely than not to have a recession in spite of the relative stabilisation in the economy in recent weeks." Greenspan said, "I still believe there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of recession," even if "that probability has receded a little and I think the probability of a severe recession has come down markedly." Those comments, in an interview with the FTimes, "come as a counter to the increasing optimism in some quarters. In the past six weeks, most economists have scaled back their estimates of the likelihood of a US recession following a better-than-expected jobs report and stronger business activity surveys. Many now think the US will narrowly dodge outright economic contraction."
Poll: Most Americans Expect $5 Gasoline. The Washington Times reports, "More than 70 percent of Americans say they expect gasoline prices to top $5 a gallon by the end of the summer, and a majority say they are driving less because of higher fuel costs, according to a Fox 5/The Washington Times/Rasmussen Reports survey. The previously unthinkable $5 price seems 'very likely' to 42 percent and 'somewhat likely' to 29 percent of those polled, suggesting that soaring gasoline costs have penetrated budgets and that consumers are pessimistic about relief."
ABC World News reported, "There's fresh concern tonight about Iran and nuclear weapons. A new UN report says Iran is still hiding information from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The UN has demanded that Iran stop enriching uranium, a key step in making the bomb. But Iran was dismissive today. It says the report shows its nuclear program is actually peaceful." The UN report, says the AP, was "unusually strongly worded," and the "tone of the language suggesting Tehran continues to stonewall the UN nuclear monitor...revealed a glimpse of the frustration felt by agency investigators stymied in their attempts to gain full answers to suspicious aspects of Iran's past nuclear activities."
On its front page, the New York Times calls the report "unusually blunt and detailed," and notes it "makes the serious allegation that Iran is learning to make more powerful centrifuges that are operating faster and more efficiently, the product of robust research and development that have not been fully disclosed to the agency." The Washington Post reports the UN agency also concluded that Iran's "civilian nuclear program has made only incremental progress in recent months, despite claims by Iranian leaders that the program is making significantly larger strides." Also on Monday, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said he "was prepared to offer Iran a new package of incentives to persuade it to abide by UN demands that it stop uranium enrichment in its nuclear program," but "declined to provide details of the new proposals."
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Jay Leno: "When speaking in Montana, Barack Obama got a standing ovation when he said, 'It is time to take back the country.' The bad news -- he was on an Indian reservation at the time."
Jay Leno: "Earlier this week, Vice President Dick Cheney gave the commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy. He was given a 19-gun salute. And two Coast Guard members were slightly injured when Cheney returned fire."
Jay Leno: "According to the financial forms, President Bush has actually lost money while he's been in the White House. But he says he will get it all back and much more, once the Nigerian businessman he's dealing with on the Internet transfers the money into his account."
Conan O'Brien: "Yesterday, Barack Obama was speaking to a Jewish group and he told them that his name Barack is the same as the Jewish word 'Baruch,' which means 'one who's blessed.' ... Obama had a harder time explaining his middle name, 'Hussein.'"
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