Clintons together campaign with Biden

SCRANTON - A little more than three weeks before the fall election, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined together for the first time in this critical Pennsylvania battleground to campaign for their once bitter rival, Barack Obama, at a rally with vice presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr.

If you blinked, you might have missed the former president sharing a stage with his wife, and Biden and his wife, Jill. After a brief speech before an adoring crowd of about 2,000 at the Riverfront Sports Complex, Bill Clinton said he had to dash off to a campaign event in Virginia.

But before he left, he gave Biden a rousing endorsement, saying that "Barack Obama could not have made a better choice" for vice president, even though he promoted his wife for the job last spring when it appeared obvious she wouldn't get the Democratic nomination for president.

Both Clintons vowed to help Obama get elected to the White House, seeming to bury the hatchet with Hillary Clinton's former rival.

"This election is too important to sit on the sidelines of history," she said.

"I haven't spent 35 years in the trenches fighting for universal health care, for children, for families, for women, for middle-class people to see another Republican in the White House squander the promise of our nation and the hopes of our people," she said.

Hillary Clinton and Obama have apparently made peace since the primary, and she has thrown her support behind him, appearing at 50 campaign events, "more than all the other runner-ups combined," Bill Clinton noted.

Biden, a son of Scranton who has campaigned in the area three times since his nomination, hammered home his message that the Democratic ticket was better on the economy and health care and was going to end the war.

"To paraphrase George Bush Sr., read my lips. We will end this war," he said to thunderous applause.

He also strongly criticized the divisive and angry tone in GOP rival John McCain's recent campaign rallies, noting that none of the audience members in the most recent presidential debate asked about "ugly inferences."

He devoted much of his speech to the faltering economy, saying Obama had the leadership skills and had assembled the best economic team to steer the country, if not the world, out of the crisis.

"Barack will be the president with the strength and ideas that the world is anxiously willing to follow," he said.

Biden recalled how his father told him that when he got knocked down he had to get right back up. It was time, he said, for America to get up.

His voice rising, he yelled out: "Get up, get up, get up!"

The visit came as several new polls suggest Obama may be opening up a significant lead in Pennsylvania, a battleground state with 21 electoral votes. With voter concern about the economy on the rise, Obama had a lead of 13.8 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of state polls as of Friday, up from 2 points in mid-September.

The Obama campaign strived to do two things in Pennsylvania this weekend: rally voter support and boost turnout in overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia - where Obama held four boisterous neighborhood rallies Saturday - and also win over voters in blue-collar swaths of the state that went heavily for Clinton in April's primary and where some still harbor doubts about the Illinois senator. Clinton defeated Obama with 74 percent of the vote in Lackawanna County, which includes Scranton, a region that Democrats believe is critical for victory in November.

Today, Hillary Clinton will campaign in the Philadelphia suburbs, with a public rally at Graeme Park Historic Site in Horsham at 12:30 p.m.

Biden, who was born in Scranton's Green Ridge section, and the Clintons are the Obama camp's not-so-secret weapons for wooing the blue-collar voters.

Hillary Clinton has strong ties to the Scranton area as well, which was a critical reason behind her success here in the primary. The senator's father, Hugh Rodham, was raised in Scranton; he moved to the Chicago area to find work during the Depression, but the Rodham family has retained close links to the area. The family returned to vacation in the family's simple cabin on nearby Lake Winola each summer during Hillary Clinton's youth, and has maintained a tradition of baptizing new arrivals at the Court Street United Methodist Church.

In fact, before the rally, the Clintons returned to the church to attend the baptism of their nephew Simon Rodham, the son of the senator's youngest brother, Tony.