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‘Support Her for Me’: Obama’s Message for Voters | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Reuters


Washington- With just one week until the general election, the Clinton campaign has deployed Obama to key battleground states including Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida in hopes that he can gin up Democratic turnout.

He is one of Hillary Clinton’s secret weapons in these final days of the election cycle. A master campaigner himself, he is working to bring that enthusiasm to Clinton at the polls.

President Barack Obama urged Democrats of all ethnic backgrounds to vote for Hillary Clinton, warning that the fate of the U.S. is at stake.

Obama delivered an urgent message to North Carolina voters, saying: “We won’t win this election, potentially, if we don’t win North Carolina,” he said during a campaign rally for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“I hate to put a little pressure on you, but the fate of the republic rests on your shoulders. The fate of the world is teetering and you, North Carolina, are going to have to make sure that we push it in the right direction,” Obama said.

Obama stated, “There is only one person in this race, who has devoted her entire life to lifting up a better America. And that is the next President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

President Obama was able to do what no other Democratic nominee had done in North Carolina in decades; he won the vote in this state in 2008.

He was, he made sure to add, not joking. Obama’s language reflected how determined he is to defeat Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and betrayed how nervous some in his own party have become over Clinton’s prospects.

“Choose hope, choose hope; Vote. And if you do, we will elect Hillary Clinton as the next president.”

It was Obama’s second stop on a weeklong swing through four pivotal states and demonstrated a new level of urgency among Democrats about the race as well as the personal stakes for Obama, who wants Clinton to carry on his agenda.

In a radio interview that aired on Wednesday, Obama admitted that the black vote is “not where it needs to be” just a week out from Election Day.

“Right now the Latino vote is up, the overall vote is up, but the African American vote right now is not where it needs to be,” the president said on the Tom Joyner Morning Show.

Obama was elected in large part due to high turnout among African Americans, many of whom saw his candidacy as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

During his interview on the Tom Joyner show, a nationally syndicated black radio show, he recognized that his candidacy was in many ways the reason for the bump in black vote, but tried to convince voters that if they fail to elect Clinton his legacy would falter.

“If you really care about my presidency and what we’ve accomplished, you are going to go and vote,” Obama said.

“If we let this thing slip and I’ve got a situation where my last two months in office are preparing for a transition to Donald Trump, whose staff people have said that their primary agenda is, to have him, in the first couple of weeks, sit in the Oval Office and reverse every single thing that we’ve done.”