Clinton, Obama aim at different targets

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

FRAZER, Pa. - In the final weekend of campaigning before Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, Sen. Barack Obama was talking about cynicism and Sen. Hillary Clinton about China.

In speeches five miles apart in the crucial battleground of Chester County, the two candidates whipped up enthusiasm among supporters and aimed for those crucial 10-second sound bites on local news broadcasts.

On Monday, Obama predicted his rival would get the victory in Pennsylvania primary, but said his goal is to keep it close.

Perhaps because of that goal, Obama seemed to focus his weekend fire sharply on Clinton herself and to some degree on her husband.

“If you are feeling cynical and your basic attitude is, ‘You know what? Things can’t really change,’ then you may decide Sen. Clinton’s your choice,” Obama told his supporters at the Downingtown train station.

He explained that voters might decide “that’s the game that’s played in Washington and we just want somebody who knows how to play the game.”

Obama knocks Clinton and lobbyists
Obama called his rival “a formidable candidate” (adding the adjective “tenacious” the next day at his Reading rally) but added, “Sen. Clinton essentially buys into the kind of politics that we’ve become accustomed to in Washington.”

He knocked Clinton for saying that lobbyists “represent real people. I think she is fundamentally wrong about that.”

Clinton’s speech to a crowd of supporters at the Good Will Fire Company Number 2 on Union Street in West Chester, Pa., a few hours earlier did not mention Obama at all.

Instead she talked about the stakes in the November election, painting a portrait of sinister foreign — especially Chinese — economic and strategic power.

“China is filling vacuums everywhere in the world that we are not there to contest,” she warned.

Video Obama, Clinton court Pa. voters April 21: The Democratic candidates for president make last-minute pitches to Pennsylvania voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports. Today show

“We are totally dependent on borrowing from foreign governments,” she said. “If you think about it, our economy runs on foreign money and foreign oil. So every morning we have to hope the bankers in Beijing and Seoul and Riyadh get up and say ‘I think we’ll buy some of America’s debt today.’ We are totally at their mercy.”

She added, “We have a huge trade deficit where we basically borrow money from these countries, principally China and others that are exporting to us, so that we can turn around and borrow from them.”

Will China dominate the 21st century?
She said later, “There are people, let’s face it, around the world who believe that America’s best days are behind us.”

The crowd cried, “Nooo!”

Then she said, “I had a discussion the other day with one of the generals who is supporting me and he had just come from China and he said the Chinese are convinced that the 21st century is their century.”

According to this unnamed American general, a Chinese military officer said to him, “That’s the way history worked. The British Empire handed off to the American. You’re going to hand it off to us.”

Again Clinton’s supporters yelled out, “Nooo!”

But she told them in a chiding voice, “Well, that’s what they believe, and they have a plan, and they are very focused on what they need to do. They are building a blue-water navy to contest us in the Pacific.”

Criticism of Clinton 1996 welfare reform
The next day (Sunday) in Reading, it was Obama’s questioners in the Q-and-A session that got in some sharp anti-Clinton digs.

“I believe that President Clinton took off welfare, made people poor, then sold our jobs out to the point where I have seen people eating out of the trash,” said the first woman to stand up and ask Obama a question.

Another questioner, Diana Rivera-O’Brian, a community activist in Reading, complained about a Clinton administration policy that, she claimed, evicted tenants in public housing if anyone with a criminal record visited them.

Obama took the opportunity to express his support for the 1996 welfare reform law, but added that it needed some changes to better support single mothers while they worked.

Obama told Rivera-O’Brian that if a grandmother in public housing knew her grandson was selling drugs she ought to be held to account.

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