100,000 Rally In St. Louis For Obama!

WOW!!! This afternoon, Barack Obama spoke at a rally under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis in front of 100,000 people.

The fight has turned to taxes. McCain is accusing Obama of "class warfare" and "socialism," when the fact is that Obama wants to return the tax system to the way it was under President Clinton, who wasn't exactly a Communist. While McCain attacked Obama's tax plan, Obama hit back before the giant crowd, saying that John McCain

"wants to cut taxes for the same people who have already been making out like bandits, in some cases literally."

"John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people 'welfare,'" Obama said.

As the McCain campaign stays in angry mode while playing defense in states like North Carolina, Obama is laying out his broad, positive vision in former red states and drawing historic crowds. As AP reports,

The candidates' itineraries underscored McCain's dilemma.

Obama spent the day in Missouri, a bellwether state that voted for President Bush in 2004. Campaign aides, citing local police, estimated 100,000 people turned out to hear him at the Gateway Arch on a sunny day.

McCain leveled his most critical rhetoric of the day in a paid weekly radio address, and he campaigned later in North Carolina and Virginia, a pair of traditionally Republican states he is struggling to hold. Aides estimated his North Carolina crowd at 4,000 to 5,000, a number he matched later in the day during an outdoor appearance in Woodbridge, Va.

The senator took the stage there to the theme song of "Rocky," a movie about an underdog and comeback fighter.

Read the AP Report for more details on the rally. Or, check out the excellent New York Times article.