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Politics : THE WHITE HOUSE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (19038)	4/3/2008 4:05:08 PM
From: pompsander	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25737

McCain sees many problems facing next president By Steve Holland 2 hours, 19 minutes ago JACKSONVILLE, Florida (Reuters) - Republican candidate John McCain on Thursday outlined a litany of problems that the next president will inherit from President George W. Bush and said Washington needs a new approach to solving them. McCain, in a speech as part of a weeklong "Service to America" tour, made no mention of Bush and aides said he was not trying to distance himself from the president, who remains popular with the Republican base in his final year in office. But taken as a whole, McCain did appear to raise some questions about how policy has been handled by both Bush and Congress in recent years. "To keep our nation prosperous, strong and growing we have to rethink, reform and reinvent," McCain said. While McCain looks ahead and past the November election, Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are engaged in a contentious fight over their party's nomination, with Pennsylvania's April 22 vote providing the next touchstone in that battle. Obama, an Illinois senator, scored a public relations victory by reporting raising more than $40 million in campaign cash in March, after a record $55 million in February. Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said her campaign would not release its fundraising figures for March until April 20. He played down the Obama announcement, saying "we knew that he was going to outraise us" and said the New York senator would have the resources she needs to be competitive. Arizona Sen. McCain said the United States should prepare, "far better than we have before," across all levels of government to respond quickly to a September 11-style attack. The Bush White House and Democrats have battled in recent years over how much money to spend on shoring up domestic defenses. McCain also said the U.S. government should be better able to respond to a natural calamity, in what sounded like a reference to the botched Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. He said "when Americans confront a catastrophe, either natural or man-made, their government, across jurisdictions, should be organized and ready to deliver bottled drinking water to dehydrated babies and rescue the aged and infirm trapped in a hospital with no electricity." DIFFERENCES WITH BUSH While Democrats say electing McCain would represent a "third Bush term," McCain has made clear he has several differences with Bush on issues like torture and global warming and that he is running on his own record, not that of Bush. But on Iraq, trade and some other issues, his positions are hard to tell apart from those of Bush. McCain, who has clinched the Republican presidential nomination, has given a series of speeches this week looking at his own personal history and laying out some of the governing themes he would follow if elected in November. McCain said the overall mission of U.S. national defense and security must examined. "To defend ourselves," he said, in a reference to the threat from Islamic extremists, "we must do everything better and smarter than we did before." "We must rethink, renew and rebuild the structure and mission of our military; the capabilities of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies; the purposes of our alliances, the reach and scope of our diplomacy" against the threat, he said. McCain, who won the Republican presidential nomination in part by wooing independent voters, laid out a role for bipartisanship in tackling the threat of Islamic extremism, deficit government spending, improving health care, reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil and opening up new markets for U.S. exports. "We can leave these difficult problems to our unlucky successors, after they've grown worse, and harder to fix. Or we can bring all parties to the table, and hammer out principled solutions to the challenges of our time," he said. The Democratic National Committee accused McCain of having neglected to address the problems he mentioned while he has had the opportunity in the Senate. "John McCain seems intent on talking about every part of his biography except the quarter of a century he has spent in Washington pursuing an out-of-touch Republican agenda that undermines the economic security of America's working families," said Democratic National Committee Communications Director Karen Finney.