Obama, Clinton plan first joint appearance

Tag : smooth joint
The event, June 26 at Washington's Mayflower Hotel with some ofClinton's most influential fund-raisers, is widely viewed as animportant step in ending the frustration Clinton's donors arefeeling over her loss to Obama in the lengthy and hard-foughtDemocratic presidential primaries earlier this month.
Jonathan Mantz, who served as Clinton's national finance director,invited the donors to the meeting and asked them to donate $2,300,the legal maximum, to Obama's general election campaign againstArizona Sen. John McCain, who will accept the Republicanpresidential nomination in September.
In return for the financial support of Clinton supporters, Obama isexpected to ask his donors to contribute to Clinton's campaign tohelp her erase a $20 million debt, including $11 million of her ownmoney.
Word of the upcoming joint appearance came amid polling datasuggesting an advantage for the Democratic Party in the generalelection against the McCain-led GOP. A new Quinnipiac Universitypoll showed Obama leading McCain in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania,the first time the Illinois senator has had an advantage in allthree battleground states.
The poll had mixed results for Clinton backers who want her on theticket with Obama, however. By margins between 24 and 29 percentagepoints, Democrats in all three states want Clinton as the vicepresidential nominee. But independents in all three nixed the ideaby an average of 13 percentage points. The poll had a 2.6 percentmargin of error in the first two states and a 2.5 percent margin oferror in Pennsylvania.