Obama charges McCain trying to divide country

updated 1:46 p.m. ET Oct. 10, 2008

WASHINGTON - Presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday accused Republican John McCain of trying to divide the country, but he let fellow Democrats handle harsher attacks while he kept his message mostly upbeat.

Speaking to an outdoor audience, Obama said "it's not hard to rile up a crowd by stoking anger and division." He said Americans want "someone who can lead this country" with a steady hand in a time of economic crisis, not divide it.

Echoing McCain's "country first" motto, Obama said, "Now more than ever it is time to put country ahead of politics."

Polls show Obama leading McCain in Ohio and several other battleground states, and he seems eager to keep his campaign on a steady, non-controversial course. As he has done for days, Obama criticized McCain's economic plans and urged Americans to stay calm and confident amid the dramatic drop in the stock market.

The Illinois senator again did not mention McCain's attacks for associating with a former 1960s radical, William Ayers. When asked on a radio talk show, however, Obama said he thought Ayers, now a college professor and neighbor in Chicago with whom he worked on community projects several years ago, was rehabilitated.

Two high-profile supporters took sharper jabs at McCain before Obama came on stage on a sunny, cool day in front of the Ross County Courthouse.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland told the crowd, "The McCain-Palin campaign and some of their followers unfortunately want you to be afraid of Barack Obama."

Ohio's gun owners, Strickland said, "have nothing to fear from Barack Obama." Nor do people who revere "family and faith," he said, calling Obama "a strong Christian, family man."

Internet rumors have falsely claimed that Obama is a Muslim.

Meanwhile, McCain, trailing in polls and searching for a way to gain ground, assailed Obama on Friday in a sharply worded TV ad that said: "When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers. When discovered, he lied."

It's McCain's toughest commercial yet using Obama's association with Ayers, a Chicago college professor who was an anti-Vietnam war radical in the 1960s, to assert that Obama has "blind ambition" and "bad judgment," and, thus, can't be trusted during an economic catastrophe. "In crisis, we need leadership" — the ad says and implies that Obama doesn't offer any.

With little more than three weeks before the election, the GOP presidential candidate is seeking to turn his campaign around by steadily escalating his attacks on his Democratic foe and raising questions about his associations with Ayers, who in 1969 helped found the violent Weather Underground group blamed for bombing government buildings in the early 1970s

The Associated Press and other news organizations have reported that Obama and Ayers are not close but that they live in the same Chicago neighborhood and worked together on two nonprofit organization boards from the mid-1990s to 2002. Ayers also hosted a small meet-the-candidate event for Obama in 1995 as he first ran for the state Senate.

The McCain campaign is also attempting to pre-empt a report due to be released Friday that looks into allegations that running mate Sarah Palin abused her power as governor of Alaska by firing the state's public safety commissioner.

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The McCain-Palin camp has already released its own report, which says public filings and an affidavit from Palin's husband clear the governor of wrongdoing.

Obama has denounced Ayers' acts, views
During the campaign, Obama has denounced Ayers' radical actions and views.

In an interview with Philadelphia-based radio talk show host Michael Smerconish, Obama said Thursday that when he met Ayers in the mid-1990s Ayers was teaching education the University of Illinois.

"I was sitting on this board with a whole bunch conservative businessmen and civic leaders and he was one of the people who was on this board," Obama said of the Annenberg Challenge, a nonprofit educational group. "Ultimately I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated."

In response, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds asked: "Does Barack Obama continue to believe William Ayers has been 'rehabilitated'? Or has Barack Obama changed his mind now that William Ayers is a liability, rather than an asset, to his political ambition?"

During a Democratic primary debate in April, Obama called Ayers "a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis."

To back up its claim that Obama lied about his relationship, McCain's campaign juxtaposed that debate comment with a CNN report in which a reporter asserted that "the relationship between Obama and Ayers went much deeper, ran much longer, and was much more political than Obama said."

But McCain's campaign provided no other evidence that Obama "lied."

Obama suggested McCain's attacks were motivated by his falling poll numbers: "I know my opponent is worried about his campaign. But that's not what I'm concerned about. I'm thinking about the Americans losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings."

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