HONOLULU, Hawaii (AFP) — Barack Obama rushed to the side of his gravely ill 85-year-old grandmother in Hawaii, leaving the White House trail behind in a highly unusual move just 11 days before the election.
The Democratic nominee held a mass open air rally before 35,000 people in midwestern Indiana, before taking a nine-hour flight to his native state, where his grandmother Madelyn Dunham brought him up for much of his childhood.
Wearing a suit with no tie, Obama disembarked from his campaign plane early Thursday evening Hawaii time and motorcaded straight to the apartment complex where his grandmother, who he knows affectionately as "Toot," lives.
Dunham, who broke her hip earlier this month and suffers from osteoporosis is the US presidential hopeful's sole remaining link with his tight-knit immediate elder family after his mother died of cancer more than a decade ago.
Obama was due to spend Friday with Dunham, for what could be a poignant farewell visit, before hitting the campaign trail again in Nevada on Saturday.
His compassionate leave comes with Republican John McCain searching for a sudden shift in momentum and new polls showing the Democrat well positioned in the vital battleground states set to decide the November 4 election.
He told CBS television he decided to make the exhausting journey half-way across the Pacific to see Dunham despite the crush of campaign events as he "got there too late" when his mother Ann Dunham died.
"We knew that she wasn't doing well but, you know, the diagnosis was such where we thought we had a little more time and we didn't. And so I want to make sure that I don't -- I don't make the same mistake twice," Obama said.
"My grandmother's the last one left. She has really been the rock of the family, the foundation of the family. Whatever strength, discipline that I have, it comes from her."
The Democrat's absence -- unprecedented this close to election day -- gives McCain the chance to grab the limelight as he searches for a way to regain ground in a race that seems to be slipping away.
Obama's place will be filled by wife Michelle and the campaign will use some of its mammoth multi-million dollar financial advantage over McCain to saturate the airwaves with Obama ads.
He left the campaign trail as a new CBS/New York Times survey found Obama leading McCain 52 to 39 percent nationwide, barely changed from a week ago.
A new sheaf of polls in battleground states by Quinnipiac University suggested Obama maintains a strong lead.
Obama led the Republican in Florida by 49 to 44 percent, compared to a 51-43 percent lead in the last survey October 1, and in another key state Pennsylvania by 53-40 percent, compared to 54-39 percent last time.
McCain lost ground in Ohio, often the decisive state in presidential elections, where Obama leads 52-38 percent, expanding his lead of 50-42 percent at the beginning of this month.
No candidate has been elected president since 1960 without taking two of these three states in the US electoral college that ultimately decides who the next president will be.
McCain set off on a bus tour through key parts of Florida on Thursday dedicated to Joe the Plumber, the Ohio tradesman who has become an emblem for his claims that Obama wants to use higher taxes on small business to "redistribute wealth."
"Senator Obama says he's trying to soak the rich but it's the middle class who are going to get wet," McCain told a rally in Sarasota.
"The answer to a slowing economy is not higher taxes, but that's exactly what will happen when the Democrats have total control of Congress," McCain said, adding: "I'm not going to let that happen."
McCain said Obama's tax plans and health care policy will "kill jobs," and noted that small businesses had managed to create around 300,000 jobs, even as the broader economy lost more than 700,000 jobs so far this year.
"In this country we believe in spreading opportunity for those whose create jobs and those who need them."
But Obama charged in Indianapolis that McCain wanted to offer tax breaks to huge US corporations he blamed for shipping jobs overseas.
"My opponent may call that "fundamental economics" but we know that's just another name for the Wall Street first, Main Street last economic philosophy we've had for the past eight years -- and that's fundamentally wrong."
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