Barack Obama cruises through Denver

by John McCormick

DENVER - If it feels like Sen. Barack Obama is trying to run the clock out, it's because he is.

As the Illinois Democrat appeared this afternoon in front of a crowd that stretched from a local government building to the state capitol - an audience his campaign said exceeded 100,000 - Obama stuck mostly to the same themes from the day before.

With brilliant fall colors behind him on a sunny but cool afternoon in Civic Center Park, there were no substantially new attacks on Sen. John McCain, his Republican rival for the presidency.

Ahead in national and many critical state polls, Obama has the cruise control on, perhaps pacing himself for what will be a frantic week of campaigning in advance of next week's election. For those gathered, he encouraged early voting.

"There's no point waiting in line if you don't have to," he said. "You know who you're going to vote for. Go to the polls. Get that mail-in ballot. Do what you need to do."

Obama became a little confused over the proper address for his Colorado campaign web site, asking the audience at one point what it was and then correcting himself for first suggesting "a dash" rather than "a dot" in the URL.

Throughout his half-hour appearance, Obama pushed his trademark message of change.

"Colorado, in just nine days, you'll have the chance to elect your next president," he said. "You'll have the chance to bring the change we need to Washington. That's the good news. But we're going to have to work, we're going to have to struggle, we are going to have to fight every single one of those nine days to move this country in a new direction."

Obama tried to use a comment McCain made earlier in the day on a televised interview that "of course" he and President Bush share the philosophy of the Republican Party.

"Then, just this morning, Sen. McCain said that actually he and president Bush share a common philosophy," Obama said. "That's right, Colorado. I guess that was John McCain finally giving us some straight talk."

As he tends to do, Obama presented McCain and Bush as the same.

"We know what the Bush-McCain philosophy looks like," he said. "It's a philosophy that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that it trickles down on everybody else."

Obama made the case that trickle-up economics are better for all.

"Rich people do better when ordinary folks are doing well," he said. "Part of the problem of what's happened on Wall Street is that ordinary folks were having trouble paying the bills, they were starting to lose their homes, they were starting to get foreclosed on and that had an impact on everybody."

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, meanwhile, suggested Obama is less of an outsider than the Republican nominee.

"Barack Obama can't name a single issue or philosophy on which he's opposed the Democratic-controlled Congress," Bounds said in a statement. "John McCain opposed President Bush's wasteful spending policy, his big oil energy policy and his efforts to grow the federal government by 40 percent. Obama supported Bush on all three."

With much seeming to be going in Obama's favor, his campaign even picked up the weekend endorsement of the Anchorage Daily News, the hometown paper of Republican running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Obama is also scheduled to appear this afternoon in Ft. Collins, Colo., before returning to Chicago for what could easily be his last night in his own bed before the election.

His Colorado stops come as news reports say Republicans are slashing their TV ads on the state's three biggest stations.