WASHINGTON: Republican John McCain’s US presidential campaign suffered a double blow yesterday when Democratic rival Barack Obama won the support of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and announced he raised a record $150 million in September.
The backing by Powell, who said he plans to vote for Obama in the Nov. 4 election, gives a boost to the foreign policy and national security credentials of the first-term Illinois senator.
McCain, despite trailing in opinion polls, said he still expects to win the election and he could sense “things are heading our way.” “We’re very happy with the way the campaign is going,” McCain said on the “Fox News Sunday” program.
“I’ve been on enough campaigns, my friend, to sense enthusiasm and momentum, and we’ve got it.”
In the midst of economic turmoil and with just over two weeks to go until the election, Obama leads in national polls and in many battleground states but McCain said he sees some movement in his direction.
Obama’s lead over McCain has dropped to 3 points, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released yesterday. Obama leads McCain 48 to 45 percent among likely US voters, down 1 percentage point from Saturday.
McCain, 72, a veteran senator from Arizona, is trailing by a much larger margin in campaign funds. Obama’s prodigious fundraising has allowed him to blanket the airwaves with advertisements, sometime by a margin of 4-to-1 over McCain.
By bringing in at least $150 million in September, Obama more than doubled the $66 million he raised in August, which had been a record. McCain has accepted public financing and is limited to spending $84 million for the entire campaign.
Unlike McCain, Obama, 47, chose not to accept public funding for his campaign, freeing the first-term Illinois senator to raise millions privately.
The Obama campaign said it had 632,000 new donors in September to bring its total to 3.1 million. It said the average donation for the month was less than $100.
McCain again chided Obama for not living up to his pledge to accept public funds and warned of the damages of unlimited spending.
“I’m saying that history shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal,” he said. When asked whether Obama was buying the election: “I think you could make that argument.” McCain said he had expected Powell, a former head of the US military’s chiefs of staff, to support his opponent but pointed out that he was endorsed by four other Republican secretaries of state.
In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Powell called Obama a “transformational figure” who could be an “exceptional president” and praised his “depth of knowledge” and “steadiness.”
Powell, who served several Republican presidents including George W. Bush as his first secretary of state, said either candidate would make a good president but he was critical of what he described as McCain’s uncertainty over how to deal with the economic crisis.
Powell saw his reputation tarnished by making the case to the United Nations that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a claim that later proved false.
Powell said he was not looking for a job in an Obama administration but left the door open. “I’ve always said if a president asks you to do something, you have to consider it,” Powell said.
