Obama, McCain wax patriotic as US marks Independence Day

Agence France-Presse . Washington
White House hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain marked the US Independence Day holiday Friday with parades, picnics and odes to patriotism. ‘Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem,’ Republican presumptive White House nominee McCain wrote in Parade magazine. ‘It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything,’ he said. Democrat Obama, who watched a traditional parade with his wife and daughters in the western state of Montana, wrote in the same magazine that for him, patriotism was a ‘gut instinct.’ ‘It’s not just the recitations of the pledge of allegiance, the Thanksgiving pageants at school, or the fireworks on the Fourth of July, but how the American ideal wove its way throughout the lessons my family taught me,’ he said. That ideal includes a ‘country where we have the unparalleled right to pursue our dreams.’ ‘With a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, I know that stories like mine can only happen in the United States of America,’ he said. Obama, who would be the first African-American US president, recalled childhood memories of Indonesia and the expatriate American life. ‘I lived overseas for a time as a child, and I remember listening to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence and explaining how its ideas applied to every American, black and white and brown alike,’ he said. McCain, who just returned from a Latin American tour designed to woo critical swing Hispanic voters, appealed to newer Americans, saying that ‘to love one’s country is to love one’s countrymen.’ ‘It is the willing acceptance of Americans, both those whose roots here extend back over generations and those who arrived only yesterday, to try to make a nation in which all people share in the promise and responsibilities of freedom,’ he said. On Thursday, visited the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, home to Mexico’s most revered icon, a stop likely aimed at Roman Catholics and Mexican-Americans voters in the United States. The basilica houses a 16th-century icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a picture depicting an apparition of a brown-skinned Virgin Mary. The icon, Mexico’s most beloved religious and cultural image, and the basilica is the second most-visited Catholic shrine in the world.