Oprah Winfrey told nearly 30,000 people yesterday in a South Carolina football stadium to shrug off Barack Obama's detractors and help him "seize the opportunity" in his bid for the White House.
"South Carolina - Jan. 26th is your moment," Winfrey said, referring to the state Democratic primary date during a campaign stop alongside the Illinois senator. "It's your time to seize the opportunity to support a man who, as the Bible says, loves mercy and does justly."
Obama's campaign said more than 29,000 attended the event at the University of South Carolina's football stadium in Columbia. It had the feel of a rock concert, with bands playing for early arrivals and campaign supporters yelling "fire it up" to the crowd.
Winfrey, who also campaigned for Obama on Saturday in Iowa, offered a touch of talk show-like advice during a 17-minute speech. "There are those who say it's not his time, that he should wait his turn. Think about where you'd be in your life if you'd waited when people told you to," she said.
"I'm sick of politics as usual," Winfrey said. "We need Barack Obama."
A recent AP-Pew Research poll has Senator Hillary Clinton of New York leading in South Carolina with 45 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, followed by Obama's 31 percent. The two candidates break even on the black vote here.
In his speech, Obama criticized the Bush administration and took several veiled swipes at Clinton, though he never mentioned his rival by name.
"I'm tired of Democrats thinking the only way to look tough on national security is to act like George Bush," he said. "We need a bold Democratic Party that's going to stand for something, not just posture and pose."
He said that if he's the party nominee, an opponent won't be able to say he supported going to war in Iraq, which Clinton did. "It's not good enough to tell the people what you think they want to hear, instead of what they need to hear," he said.
Obama was accompanied by his wife, Michelle. "You know you've got a good program when I'm the third-best speaker on the stage," he said.
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Giuliani says police made decision on security detail
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani yesterday defended the expenses incurred by his security detail as he was beginning an affair with current wife Judith Nathan, saying police made the decision after she received threats.
Giuliani in recent weeks has faced a barrage of questions about New York police security costs for his trysts with Nathan and about his business clients, which have included the Persian Gulf country of Qatar. Although a US ally, Qatar is accused of sheltering suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," Giuliani did not directly answer when asked why the security expenses were billed to obscure city offices, making their detection difficult. He responded that the NYPD had deemed the security detail necessary because of threats against him and his loved ones, including Nathan.
"This was all based on threat assessments by the New York City police department, all based on their analysis to protect her life, my life, other people's lives," Giuliani said. "They made the choice."
Records first reported by Politico.com last month showed repeated trips between 1999 and 2002 to Long Island, where Nathan had a condominium. Giuliani's first trip was from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, 1999 - months before he acknowledged the breakdown of his second marriage.
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Huckabee stands by words in '92 about AIDS patients
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that he won't run from his statement 15 years ago that AIDS patients should have been isolated.
The Republican presidential hopeful acknowledged the prevailing scientific view then, and since, that the virus that causes AIDS is not spread through casual contact, but said that was not certain. He cited revelations in 1991 that a dentist had infected a patient in a case that highlighted the risk of infection through contact with blood or bodily fluids.
"I still believe this today, [that] we were acting more out of political correctness," in responding to the AIDS crisis, he said on "Fox News Sunday." "I don't run from it, I don't recant it," he said of his position in 1992, but he said he would state his view differently in retrospect.
Huckabee said at the time that "we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague" if the federal government was going to deal with the spread of the disease effectively. The former Arkansas governor denied that those words were a call to quarantine the AIDS population, although he did not explain how else isolation would be achieved.
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