McCain and Obama Palling Around? Must Be the Al Smith Dinner - NY Times

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/mccain-and-obama-palling-around-must-be-the-al-smith-dinner/?hp

Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, announced that he had dismissed his entire team of senior advisers. “All of their positions will now be held by a man named Joe the Plumber,’’ he cracked.

His rival, Senator Barack Obama, then made a confession about his past associations. “John McCain is onto something,’’ he said. “There was a point in my life when I started palling around with a pretty ugly crowd, I’ve got to be honest. These guys were serious deadbeats, they were lowlifes, they were unrepentant no-good punks. That’s right: I’ve been a member of the United States Senate.’’

With a pair of rivals taking time away from the fray to swap jokes, it could only be the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, the white-tie charity roast that has long served as a light-hearted rest stop on the road to the White House. It brought Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama together Thursday night to dine together and trade some light-hearted jokes — some self-deprecating, some not so much — just one night after their third and final debate was so rough that many commentators could finally dust off all those boxing metaphors that they had been saving up this year.

They poked fun at themselves — and each other — in consecutive monologues that had their audience of New York royalty at the Waldorf-Astoria in stitches.

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