The Trail

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

A RETORT TO BIDEN

McCain Jumps on Talk Of Early Test for Obama

COLUMBIA, Mo. --John McCain has not been talking too much about international affairs in recent days, but the suggestion by Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden that the world may try to test a President Obama early in his administration prompted him to dive back in.

Biden was quoted telling a crowd at a Seattle fundraiser Sunday: "Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America.

"Remember I said it standing here, if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're going to going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Biden urged the crowd to stand by Obama when he is elected president, a comment that drew a response from McCain.

"The next president won't have time to get used to the office," McCain said. "We face many challenges here at home, and many enemies abroad in this dangerous world. Just last night, Senator Biden guaranteed that if Senator Obama is elected, we will have an international crisis to test America's new president. We don't want a president who invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars."

-- Michael Abramowitz

ANOTHER GOP DEFECTION

Ken Adelman Says He Supports Obama

Kenneth Adelman is the latest Republican foreign policy heavyweight to back Barack Obama, telling the New Yorker's George Packer that he intends to vote for the Democrat in two weeks.

"When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird," Adelman wrote, according to Packer. "Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I've concluded that that's no way a president can act under pressure."

Adelman was once an adviser to the Bush administration on the Iraq war and has held senior policy positions under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. He is a staunch conservative, though he has broken with Vice President Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the handling of the war.

He told Packer that John McCain's pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate was the last straw.

"That decision showed appalling lack of judgment," he wrote in an e-mail, according to Packer. "Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office -- I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency."

-- Michael D. Shear

ONE QUESTION MARK

Biden's Records Show Good Health

Joe Biden appears to be in good health, suffering no lingering effects from his 1988 brain aneurysm and nothing out of the ordinary for a man his age, according to 49 pages of medical records released Monday.

The records do not, however, include any references to any specific follow-up to the aneurysm, which was treated with emergency surgery, making it unclear how carefully he has been followed.

In a conference call with reporters, Matthew Parker, a D.C. internist who reviewed Biden's health records, said he spoke with John F. Eisold, the Capitol physician. "Dr. Eisold, his treating doctor, thinks he's in excellent health," Parker said. Eisold does not give interviews.

Parker said he did not know whether Biden had brain imaging to follow up on the aneurysm surgery.

In a July letter to Biden included in the records, Eisold wrote: "You have recovered fully without continued effects."

Biden experienced at least one episode of a potentially dangerous irregular heartbeat called an atrial fibrillation in July 2006. But cardiac examinations at the time and later have found no signs of heart disease. His blood pressure is normal.

Biden's doctor suggested the irregular heartbeat may have been caused by too much coffee, and he urged him to drink less caffeine, exercise more and take an aspirin a day.

-- Perry Bacon Jr. and Rob Stein