Obama launches general election campaign in Bristol

By MARK SAGE/Staff

Southwest Virginia is filled with good, hardworking people who have been forgotten, Sen. Barack Obama told supporters Thursday.
And though Washington may have neglected this part of the country and others like it, Obama vowed that as president he would listen, pay attention and make life better here and across the nation.
Just two days after sewing up the Democratic nomination, Obama found himself surrounded by friendly faces, kicking off his general election run in a city where he’d fallen short of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s vote totals by a nearly two-to-one margin.
“I think it says a lot about somebody about where they choose to start their campaign,” said former Gov. Mark Warner, who kicked off his Senate bid in early May less than 20 miles up the road.
Warner, who along with U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-9, introduced Obama to the capacity crowd in the Virginia High School auditorium, said the Democratic presidential candidate wouldn’t forget small-town America. He said Obama would govern with common sense and trust in America’s greatest asset – the character of the people.
Warner reminded the crowd, some too young to remember it at all, that he once showed up in Bristol, a cell phone guy from northern Virginia, asking the voters in this end of the state to give him a chance. (Before political aspirations took him to the Richmond, Warner had helped fund the startup of Nextel.) On Thursday he asked voters on this end of the state to do the same for Obama.
He described the Illinois senator as a man who understands that good ideas don’t come with a “D” or an “R” attached and said Obama was a man of deep faith who had spent his lifetime bringing people together. Faith was an issue that Warner revisited several times during his short speech Thursday morning.
“Take the time to get to know this man,” he said.
Borrowing a line from a 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. speech on the war in Vietnam, Obama said he’s running at a young age – he’s 46 – not because he thinks it’s due him or that it’s his turn, but out of a sense of the “fierce urgency of now.” He said there is such a thing as being too late.
“That hour,” he said, “is almost upon us.”
The country is embroiled in two wars, one with al Qaeda that we have to win, and one in Iraq that we should have never been in, he said.
But it’s not just wars that have contributed to the “urgency,” Obama said, citing struggles at home.
“Everywhere I go, people are struggling to get by,” he said.
Obama said for the first time since World War II, corporate profits and stocks have shown gains while the average family income decreases. Millions of children around the country are not equipped, he said, since “schools are underfunded and teachers are underpaid.”
“We cannot afford to wait” to fix schools and health care, Obama said.
At the Bristol campaign stop, Obama keyed in on the issue of health care. He said this election is about the 47 million Americans who don’t have health insurance and the even greater number who have seen co-pay premiums skyrocket till they’re barely able to afford what they’ve got. He admitted that the issue is a popular one during election cycles and has been bandied about for a long time. Each time, he said, candidates promise and then fail to deliver on the promise. The reason, he said, is the billions of dollars big drug and insurance companies pour into Washington to keep reform from happening.
That won’t happen on his watch, Obama said. He’s refusing to take contributions from Political Action Committees and federal lobbyists. Not only that, he said, but the Democratic National Committee also will no longer take a dime from special interests.
“They will not fund my party,” he said. 
During the Bristol, Va., town hall meeting, Obama took several swipes at Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, particularly on health care, and drawing chuckles at a reference to McCain’s plans as “Bush light” policies. He noted that under the Bush Administration, premiums shot up four times faster than wages.
“I think the American people are ready for something new.”
He said McCain only wanted to take care of the “healthy and wealthy” with a plan that could drive up care costs, force some to lose insurance altogether and raise taxes on self-employed workers.
Within hours, the Republican camp had sent an e-mail rebuttal to the Obama charges, saying the Arizona senator’s proposal called for a $5,000 per family tax credit and “greater affordability and accessibility to care.” The e-mail from a regional spokeswoman from the Republican National Convention said Obama “has no record of bipartisan success” with health care and that even other Democrats in Washington have called his plan “unrealistic.”
Obama laid out a plan that would provide universal health care to all who want it, working with companies to lower premiums where possible and subsidizing those who cannot afford to buy into a system similar to the one U.S. Representatives are covered by. Those with insurance would end up paying $2,500 less. In addition, Obama said his plan places more emphasis on prevention and regular checkups, making it “health care, not disease care.”
Along with traditional health care, Obama said he supports mental health care parity, saying that someone suffering from depression should be covered in the same way as someone limping on a broken leg. Society pays a cost in undertreating mental health issues in the form of more homelessness and later prison terms. The question, he said, is do we pay it on the front end or the back end. The issue is especially important when it comes to U.S. troops, who he said where seven times more likely, if not treated, than non-veterans to wind up homeless.
Obama said his plan for universal coverage is a sound starting point. Negotiations would, he said, call for adjustments. And hospitals, insurance companies and drug companies would have a seat at the negotiating table.
“They just won’t be able to buy every chair,” he said.
He also promised that the negotiations would be broadcast on C-Span, eliminating any backroom deals that don’t work for the good of the American people. The broadcasting, he said, is where American citizens come in.
“All of you are going to have to hold Congress accountable,” he said.
Everyone, from worker to business owner, Republican and Democrat, has an interest in making America healthier and spending less on health care. Obama promised to “do it by the end of my first term.”
Co-opting his opponent’s catch phrase, Obama told the Bristol, Va., crowd that the people want straight talk from a leader who will lift the country up.
He said he was proud of America for giving him the opportunity to seek the highest office in the land, noting that it is sign of enormous growth. However, he said there’s still work to do. The endpoint wasn’t getting the Democratic nomination, or even coming out victorious in November. The endpoint, he said, is making lives better.
Working together, he said, there is “no challenge we cannot meet, no destiny we cannot fulfill.”