GREEN, Ohio (AP) – Presidential rivals John McCain and Barack Obama united to help narrate an opening to the World Series telecast Wednesday highlighting how baseball – America’s pastime – has drawn the country together in challenging times.
Taped by Obama on Saturday and McCain on Sunday, the opening features a montage of images from the Civil War through the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and notes historical parallels to the economic turmoil and two wars that now grip the nation.
“Throughout our history, this country has faced times of peril. But standing by our side, as it does tonight, has been baseball,” says actor Michael Douglas, the lead narrator.
rer Albert Spalding saying, “It received its baptism in the bloody days of our nation’s direst danger, when soldiers North and South were striving to forget their foes.”
McCain notes the contribution Jackie Robinson made as the first black player in the major leagues, quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: “He was a Freedom Rider before freedom rides.”
Obama also starts, before McCain picks up and then they both finish together, John F. Kennedy saying, “I think that both baseball and the country will endure.”
Despite the unity of purpose, the message carried no small measure of irony within the presidential campaign.
McCain, in one of the voiceovers taped after he appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” quotes President Herbert Hoover saying, “Next to religion, baseball has furnished a greater impact on American life than any other institution.”
On the campaign trail, McCain criticizes Obama for proposing to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans at a time of recession, noting the last president to do that was Hoover. McCain said that triggered the Great Depression – an event depicted in the film.
“That didn’t work out too well,” McCain says wryly on the stump.
Meanwhile, Obama was helping introduce a World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and Tampa Bay Rays after McCain criticized him for expressing allegiance to both teams during visits to the swing states where they play.
Obama, a self-professed Chicago White Sox fan, subsequently reiterated that he will root for the Phillies in the best-of-seven series. McCain is a fan of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who last won the Series in 2001.
McCain’s wife, Cindy, and her children own a minority stake in the Arizona Diamondbacks.
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