Obama lead slips as McCain goes on attack

As the two presidential candidates head into the final week of the campaign, Barack Obama's lead over John McCain has slipped from five percentage points to four according to a national Zogby poll for Reuters and C-SPAN released today, while Democratic campaign managers also have to deal with two controversies that have come back to haunt their candidate.

The three-day national tracking poll shows Obama ahead by 49 per cent to 45 per cent among likely voters, one point down from his five-point advantage on Monday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points. Says pollster John Zogby: "With seven days to go in this race, McCain is still not where he needs to be with some key groups and he is running out of time."

Which is why McCain has been targeting Obama on the campaign trail as "the redistributor-in-chief" in an effort to persuade voters that the Democrat's tax plans will involve "redistributing" wealth across the board rather than creating opportunities to increase wealth.

Yesterday the Drudge Report re-posted an audio tape of a radio interview Obama gave to a Chicago station seven years ago in which he discussed the civil rights movement and the actions of the Supreme Court. "I think where it [the Supreme Court] succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order [and] as long as I could pay for it I would be OK. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society."

Obama, then an Illinois state senator and law school lecturer, went on to call this lost chance one of the "tragedies" of the civil rights movement.

Political commentators say Obama's point was the same made down the years by many civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr, who hoped that after winning the right to vote, black Americans would also be helped in terms of economic justice.

But at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, McCain brought up the interview, saying: "It is amazing that even at this late hour, we are still learning more about Senator Obama and his agenda." He said Obama "believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs".

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the re-emergence of the interview as "a fake news controversy drummed up by the all-too-common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report, and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months".

The Obama camp also has to deal with the return of the Rev Jeremiah Wright. A right-wing Republican political action group (PAC) has paid for a TV ad (see below) to be broadcast in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida - the three most populous battleground states - which features the now infamous video of the Rev Wright, Obama's former pastor, declaring "God Damn America".

"For 20 years Barack Obama followed a preacher of hate and said nothing as Wright raged against our country," the ad intones. "He built his power base in Wright's church. Wright was his mentor, advisor and close friend for 20 years. Obama never complained - until he ran for president. The ad
concludes: "Barack Obama. Too radical. Too risky."

The McCain campaign has distanced itself from previous attacks on Obama that have exploited the Wright connection. This one is paid for by the National Republican Trust Committee which, according to a report on National Public Radio, was formed by "a former Defence Department strategist, a freelance journalist and a lawyer who have tried to prove a link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks."

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 28, 2008