Mr Obama (left) said he would consider appointing Mr McCain to 'any position ... where I thought he was going to be the best person for our country'. -- PHOTO: AP
WASHINGTON - DEMOCRAT Barack Obama held onto his solid lead in the polls and appeared confident of capturing the US presidency in the historic race, but steeled his supporters for a crescendo of vicious attacks in the final hours of the campaign.
With just four days to go after a marathon contest, the Obama campaign went on the offensive in several solidly Republican states on Friday.
Obama has 5-point lead over McCain
WASHINGTON - DEMOCRAT Barack Obama's lead over Republican rival John McCain dipped slightly to 5 points with three days left in the race for the White House, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Saturday.
Mr Obama leads Mr McCain by 49 per cent to 44 per cent among likely voters in the three-day national tracking poll, down from a 7-point advantage on Friday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
WASHINGTON - REPUBLICAN John McCain's campaign chief Rick Davis on Friday promised supporters that despite media reports to the contrary, Mr McCain could still win the White House.
'If your television is tuned to cable news as frequently as ours are here at campaign headquarters, you have seen the pundits say John McCain and his campaign are done', Mr Davis said in an email to supporters.
WASHINGTON - MR BARACK Obama's aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public housing in Boston, is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago.
The Associated Press has learned 56-year-old Zeituni Onyango, who was referred to as 'Aunti Zeituni' in Mr Obama's memoir, was instructed to leave the United States by a US immigration judge who denied her asylum request.
Democrats announced they would air television ads in Georgia, North Dakota and even Arizona, which Republican John McCain has represented in the US Senate for 22 years.
'We are four days away from bringing change to America', Mr Obama told a crowd in Iowa, where he won an upset victory in January in the state's presidential caucuses. 'Four days'.
The underdog McCain, meanwhile, spent a second day touring Ohio in his 'Straight Talk Express' bus, and appeared with California Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow Republican, in a last-ditch effort to win a state critical to his hopes for victory.
No Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio, but Mr McCain trails in the polls there by a wide margin.
'You're going to be the battleground state again', Mr McCain told a crowd in Steubenville, in the economically suffering south-east of the state.
'You're going to be the one who decides. I need Ohio and I need you.'
Mr McCain's advisers insist that their private polls show the candidate is closing the gap with Mr Obama in a number of contested states.
But an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll of likely voters put the Democrat well ahead nationwide, 51 to 43, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The same survey gave Mr McCain reason to hope - one in seven voters, 14 per cent of the total - said they were undecided or might yet change their minds.
But Mr McCain may be running out of time to turn the tide.
Mr Obama, who is seeking to become the first black US president, has tapped public concern about two long-running US wars abroad and a faltering economy at home.
He has also raised hundreds of millions of US dollars more than Mr McCain for his campaign.
Mr McCain and his supporters have fought back by accusing Mr Obama of associating with radicals, advocating surrender in Iraq and supporting socialist economic policies.
'Sen Obama's economic policy is from the far left of American politics and ours is in the centre', Mr McCain said on Friday on ABC's Good Morning America television programme.
In Iowa, Mr Obama accused the Republicans of practicing 'slash and burn, say-anything, do-anything politics that's calculated to divide and distract; to tear us apart instead of bringing us together.'
He said he admired a presidential candidate who said in 2000: 'I will not take the low road to the highest office in this land.' 'Those words were spoken eight years ago by my opponent, John McCain,' Mr Obama said. 'But the high road didn't lead him to the White House then, so this time, he decided to take a different route.'
Despite this, Mr Obama later told CNN that, if he is elected, he would consider appointing Mr McCain to 'any position ... where I thought he was going to be the best person for our country'.
As part of Mr McCain's effort to capture Ohio, Mr McCain hosted Mr Schwarzenegger - the former bodybuilder and actor who played the lead in the Terminator series of Hollywood blockbusters - at a rally in the city of Columbus on Friday afternoon, where he offered to help the lanky Obama beef up his 'skinny legs' and 'scrawny little arms'.
On the Democratic side, Mr Obama drew former Vice President Al Gore onto the campaign trail in Florida, where a 36-day recount resulted in Mr Bush winning the state by 537 votes over Mr Gore in the 2000 presidential election, putting him in the White House.
'It's been a long eight years,' Mr Gore said as he took the stage to raucous applause from about 200 supporters.
Mr McCain's campaign said the candidate would appear on Saturday on the late-night comedy show, Saturday Night Live.
The satirical programme has bolstered its ratings in recent months by lampooning Mr McCain's choice for the Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov Sarah Palin, who is bidding to become America's first woman vice president.
Both Mr McCain and Mr Obama are expected to appear at half time on a nationally televised American football game on Monday night.
But nationwide appeals may matter less, in the end, then the gruelling chess game of state-by-state campaigning that marks US presidential contests.
Under the US system, the president is not elected by direct popular vote nationwide. Instead, the successful candidate must win 270 out of 538 electoral votes in what amounts to a state-by-state contest. Electoral votes are allocated to each state roughly according to population.
Mr McCain has won come-from-behind political contests before. But his campaign has struggled throughout the fall, plagued by internal bickering and divisions in the party ranks.
In an interview on Thursday with National Public Radio, Mr Lawrence Eagleburger, a former secretary of state and prominent McCain supporter, who said Mrs Palin isn't prepared to take over as president in a crisis.
He added that she could eventually become 'adequate'. He later apologised for the comments.
Mrs Palin campaigned on Friday in Pennsylvania, where she charged that Mr Obama represented the 'far left wing' of the Democratic party and had an ideological commitment to raising taxes.
Mr Obama is proposing tax increases on families making over US$250,000 and individuals making over US$200,000 and tax cuts for the 95 per cent of workers making less than US$200,000.
The Democrats' vice presidential candidate, US Sen Joe Biden, told a crowd in Delaware that history will judge the Bush administration harshly for failing to build a strong economy and to unite the world against global terrorism.
'The Bush legacy, the one that John McCain wants to continue, is an America where we are divided from each other, a nation divided from the world', Mr Biden said.
Later Friday, Mr Biden was to take the campaign to Ohio to counter Mr McCain.
Mr Obama, meanwhile, travelled to his hometown of Chicago on Friday, and later to Indiana, a historically Republican state where he was tied with Mr McCain in a statistical dead heat.
Mr Obama used the occasion of Halloween to rib Mr McCain in a new way, saying the Republican wore his usual costume: 'Just like every year, he's going as George W. Bush.' -- AP
