[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/images/02/15/art.deservesad.hrc.jpg caption="Sen. Clinton released another ad in Wisconsin Friday."]
(CNN) - On Friday, the newest negative ad hit the airwaves in Wisconsin – the third such spot launched by a Democratic presidential campaign in three days.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign unveiled an ad Wednesday that took aim at Barack Obama for turning down an offer to debate her in Wisconsin before the state’s February 19 primary, tying the decision to his stands on other issues.
Obama’s campaign struck back the next day with a spot that responded to Clinton’s, calling the original ad an instance of "the same old politics of phony charges and false attacks."
Today, Clinton’s campaign debuted ‘Deserves,’ a response to what it called “false attacks” in the Obama spot.
"Barack Obama still won't agree to debate in Wisconsin,” says the announcer in the 30-second ad, which will also air in Wisconsin. “And now he's hiding behind false attack ads.”
The ad criticized Obama’s stands on issues like health care and Social Security, and asked
“Why won’t Barack Obama debate these differences? Wisconsin deserves better.”
The state's voters head to the polls next Tuesday.
–CNN Associate Political Editor Rebecca Sinderbrand
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/images/02/15/art.neworleans.getty.jpg caption="In New Orleans, the Ninth Ward struggles two years after Hurricane Katrina."] NEW ORLEANS (CNN) - The Lower Ninth Ward here in New Orleans is so depressing. I spent part of the day driving around the miles and miles of destruction. Whole blocks are just empty lots. Where homes once stood, there are now only concrete slabs left. You see an occasional trailer where a family has tried to re-establish their lives. Some of the residents are trying to rebuild their actual homes. But it’s extremely difficult.
My guide was Peter Kovacs, the managing editor of The Times-Picayune, the newspaper that won a Pulitzer for its coverage of Katrina. He’s been through this area so many times. He knows the empty lots and the missing people who have been forced to resettle elsewhere around the country. He’s not upbeat about the Lower Ninth Ward ever being what it was. What a sad story.
In the course of the tour, we came upon Charmyne Fluker. She was visiting there with her elderly mother who had lived in a home in the neighborhood for years – only to see it wiped away by the storm. They were forced to move to North Carolina. This was the first time her mother had come back to see the devastation and to understand why there was no real opportunity of actually coming home. Charmyne told me her mom had to see the area with her own eyes in order to reach finality.
There is so much that needs to be done. What is encouraging, Kovacs told me, is that about a million people from all over the country have come to New Orleans since Katrina to volunteer some of their time to help rebuild. Some spend a day; others weeks.
This weekend, the NBA is having its All-Star Game here. NBA officials, players, coaches, and fans are doing their part – painting, cleaning and building. But they are also doing their part by simply being here.
–CNN Anchor Wolf Blitzer
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/images/02/15/art.mcobama.gi.jpg caption=" John McCain and Barack Obama shake hands at the debate prior to the New Hampshire primary in January."]
If John McCain and Barack Obama end up facing each other in November, it would be a historic election representing a true generational battle.
The match-up would pit the 71-year-old McCain, who if elected would become the oldest president ever, against the 46-year-old Obama, who would be one of the youngest.
We're starting to get a glimpse of what this race would be all about. By seizing on the mantle of change, Obama has drawn record numbers of young voters to the polls who see him a something of a rock star.
And, after their respective victories in the Potomac Primaries on Tuesday, both men seemed to set their sights on each other. McCain called hope a "powerful thing", saying he's seen men's hopes tested in hard and cruel ways.
He then went on to contrast his POW experience with Obama's speeches, adding: "To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude." Those would be classified as "fightin' words."
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[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/images/02/15/art.niu.ap.jpg caption="Students console one another after Thursday's tragedy at Northern Illinois University."]
CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) - There are two Americas, all right, but not in the sense that any presidential candidate has ever used the phrase on a campaign-rally stage.
It was from a stage 65 miles west of here, on the campus of Northern Illinois University, that a gunman opened fire yesterday into a class full of students listening to an ocean sciences lecture. That's the most haunting of all the haunting images of the massacre: a man stepping suddenly out of nowhere and onto a stage, and beginning to shoot at the audience.
It's too early, before the funerals have been held, to dwell too closely on the symbolism of that - the previously anonymous would-be murderer seeking, literally, a public stage - but it's not too early to consider the two Americas. They have nothing to do with left or right, with Republican or Democrat, with affluent or impoverished.
They have to do with the America that makes sense - the country in which all of the candidates, regardless of political party, reside - and the America that doesn't, which seems, increasingly, to be the country in which we all too often find ourselves living.
The words that the candidates from both parties have been using on campaign stages for months now - “change,” and “hope,” and “future,” and “progress” - are words from that logical and linear America, the one that relies upon a belief that morning will inexorably follow the darkness. In the other America, though - the insane one, the one we don't like to look at - those words, on a day like today, seem like taunts.
A presidential campaign provides the useful and comforting illusion of controlled chaos - of frantic fighting that, ultimately, is settled with handshakes and smiles and precisely tabulated victories and losses. After months of insults and ill feelings, Mitt Romney and John McCain stand before the cameras together as comrades. The message is: order, in the end, rules. Please disregard the previous mayhem.
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