- (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham
Clinton is proposing billions of dollars a year Wednesday to keep jobs
from being shipped abroad as she appealed to blue collar workers in Pennsylvania,
the next big primary contest where she hopes to trim rival Barack Obama's
lead.
- Obama seemed to ignore the former first lady, turning
his political guns on presumptive Republican nominee John McCain to blast
his stands on the Iraq war and the economy.
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- Clinton has come under pressure from Obama supporters
in recent days to drop out of the contest because of what some see as the
Illinois senator's insurmountable delegate lead with just 10 primaries
and caucuses to go.
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- But the former first lady showed no signs of quitting
as she focused on job creation and challenges to the U.S. economy at campaign
appearances across Pennsylvania, which holds the next primary contest on
April 22 with 158 delegates at stake.
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- At an economic summit in Pittsburgh on Wednesday organized
by her presidential campaign, Clinton was expected to propose the elimination
of tax breaks for companies that move jobs to other countries and use the
savings to provide $7 billion a year in tax incentives to persuade companies
to "insource" jobs in the United States.
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- Pennsylvania and other states holding upcoming primaries,
including Indiana and Kentucky, have suffered the loss of manufacturing
jobs in recent years and have yet to transition to new industries and other
ways of expanding their economies.
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- Clinton's plan would offer new tax benefits for research
and job development. It would also create "innovation and research
clusters" and provide $500 million annually in investments to encourage
the creation of high-wage jobs in clean energy.
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- Obama tried to look past his nomination battle with Clinton
to the general election matchup with the Republican nominee-in-waiting
John McCain, who has been playing up his foreign policy and national security
experience.
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- The Associated Press has learned that Obama is picking
up the endorsement of former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, the top Democrat
on the panel that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, which could boost
his national security standing.
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- Hamilton planned to announce the endorsement Wednesday.
He is the highest profile Indiana Democrat to back Obama before the state's
May 6 primary.
- The former Indiana lawmaker served on the House Foreign
Affairs Committee during his more than three decades in Congress and also
was co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission that assessed
U.S. policy in Iraq.
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- On Tuesday, Clinton lashed both the Republicans and Obama,
most notably with vows not to quit the race and likened herself to a hometown
Philadelphia legend, the film boxer Rocky Balboa.
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- "Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing
a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up.
And neither do the American people," Clinton said Tuesday at the Pennsylvania
AFL-CIO convention in Philadelphia. The organization is one of America's
largest labor union federations.
- The Pennsylvania vote, in which polls show Clinton with
a comfortable lead over Obama, is key to the former first lady's bid to
whittle down her opponent's overall lead in popular votes, delegates and
states won.
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- According to the Associated Press tally of delegates,
Obama leads Clinton 1,632-1,500, including the so-called superdelegates,
elected officials and party leaders who can vote for whichever candidate
they want regardless of primary and caucus outcomes. A total of 2,024 delegates
are needed to win the nomination at the party's national convention this
summer in Denver.
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- But Obama turned his attention to McCain as if victory
in the increasingly bitter nomination race against Clinton were a foregone
conclusion.
- "He's on a biography tour right now," Obama
said of McCain. "Most of us know his biography, and it's worthy of
our admiration. My argument with John McCain is not with his biography,
it's with his policies."
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- McCain has opened a drive in recent days to define himself
as a candidate with an impeccable military pedigree and experience in national
security issues absent in either Clinton or Obama.
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- For his part, Obama has argued that a McCain victory
would be another four years of President George W. Bush on economic and
military policies.
- "Senator McCain has been saying I don't understand
national security, but he's the one who wants to keep tens of thousands
of United States troops in Iraq for as long as 100 years," Obama said.
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- McCain has said the U.S. could end up having a long-term
military presence in Iraq, similar to the more than 50-year presence of
U.S. soldiers in Germany and South Korea.
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- "One hundred years in a country that had nothing
to do with 9/11 may make sense to George Bush and John McCain but it is
the wrong thing to do," Obama said, drawing applause at the town-hall
session.
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- McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said Obama's remarks showed
his "complete lack of preparedness to be commander in chief."
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- "His attempt to paint McCain's position as something
else is nothing but the disingenuous, old-style politics that he claims
to reject," Bounds said.
- Clinton assaulted McCain as a candidate who would stand
back and watch as the U.S. economy spiraled downward and blamed Bush for
the nation's deepening financial difficulties. She announced support for
a plan to create 3 million new jobs to rebuild the U.S. infrastructure.
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- Obama latched onto the same theme, promising to create
jobs by using $60 billion he said would be saved by ending the Iraq war.
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- Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.
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