Barack Obama said Wednesday that Americans do not “owe” John McCain the presidency for the years he spent in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp.
“We owe him gratitude for that,” Obama said in Montana before traveling to Denver. “But we don’t owe him our vote.”
Obama made his comment at a meeting with military veterans in which he criticized McCain on economic policies and early opposition to Democratic-sponsored expanded veterans benefits.
An aide said afterward that Obama’s comment was a “riff” not planned in advance.
DOGGED ENTHUSIASM: Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, an emerging star at the Democratic convention, roused Florida delegates at their Wednesday breakfast meeting — and even made them bark.
With bolo tie and infectious enthusiasm, Schweitzer vowed to bring Montana and its three electoral votes into the Democratic column. Montana has voted for a Democrat for president only once since 1964.
He had a challenge for Florida and its 27 electoral votes. “Florida is the big dog,” he said. “Are you going to let a tail like Montana wag the big dog, or is the big dog going to stand up and bark?”
That prompted more than a few to “Bark! bark! bark!”
CLEARING THE AIR: Bob Barr, the presidential candidate who can’t get a seat in the fall debates — well, one of many minor-party candidates who won’t be invited — has found a forum of his own: “The Colbert Report.”
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Barr will represent the Libertarians on the presidential ballot — “a political party that believes that it is my right as an American to varnish in an unventilated room,” Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert explains.
FITTING: On the Straight Talk Air, the person to see for T-shirts, baseball caps, beach balls, bumper stickers and other swag is Steve Duprey, the former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party.
Duprey, a Concord developer, turned his business over to a colleague and hit the road with John McCain following the senator’s huge comeback in New Hampshire at the beginning of the year.
His latest T-shirt — in black — says: “I’d rather have a cool old dude with experience than a young hip celebrity with none. Vote John McCain.”
In case you’re wondering, “old dude” is what Paris Hilton called McCain. Duprey insists he would never call McCain an old dude.