Clinton, Trump battle on

KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa. -- Hillary Clinton unleashed a new offensive against Donald Trump on Tuesday, pushing the Republican's outspoken comments back to the forefront. Trump strove to blend a quieter, presidential tone with his usual tough rhetoric, warning that a Clinton victory would "destroy American health care forever."

The White House contenders clashed from afar -- Clinton in battleground Florida and Trump in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- with the sprint to next week's finish well underway.

"For my entire life, I've been a woman," Clinton said in Florida. "And when I think about what we now know about Donald Trump and what he's been doing for 30 years, he sure has spent a lot of time demeaning, degrading, insulting and assaulting women."

Trump has faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct in recent weeks, complicating his efforts to win over women. He has denied every accusation, but President Barack Obama said there was a pattern at work to which voters needed to pay heed.

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"This is a lifetime of calling women pigs and dogs and slobs," Obama said at a rally in Ohio. "The part we're concerned about is if we start acting like this is normal."

For Trump, the day's first appearance marked a sharp shift from his standard brash tone as he delivered carefully scripted remarks focused on health care. He cautioned that Clinton's plan to strengthen the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would lead to dire consequences.

"People all across the country are devastated," Trump said to a small, invited audience gathered outside Philadelphia. "In many instances, their health care costs are more than their mortgage costs or their rent, which by the way is a first in American history. This is particularly unfair to millennials and younger Americans, generally, who will be totally crushed by these massive health care costs before they even get started on their journey through life." He did not provide data to support his assertions.

"If we don't repeal and replace Obamacare, we will destroy American health care forever," Trump said in Pennsylvania, a state where some premiums are expected to rise by more than 40 percent.

He also promised that, if elected, he would call a special session of Congress to replace the law.

"When we win on Nov. 8 and elect a Republican Congress, we will be able to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare. Have to do it. I will ask Congress to convene a special session so we can repeal and replace," Trump said.

However, Congress would already be in session when the next president takes office. It was unclear what Trump meant by "special session."

Trump also promised to replace the federal health care law with health care savings accounts and allow states to craft their own Medicaid programs to cover low-income residents.

The nonpartisan Center for Health and Economy determined this summer that Trump's proposal would lower premiums significantly for policies purchased directly by consumers but also would leave 18 million people uninsured. The nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund predicted that 20 million people would lose coverage under Trump's plan while Clinton's would add coverage for 9 million.

Clinton endorses the Affordable Care Act, which relies on private insurers in the marketplaces created under the law. But she has said she wants to make a variety of changes to the statute, including allowing people 55 and older to buy into Medicare and permitting states to choose to create a government-administered alternative to private insurers in the marketplaces.

Trump was introduced in King of Prussia by his running mate, Mike Pence, who expanded Medicaid coverage as part of Obama's law as Indiana governor.

Pence called the Affordable Care Act "a crushing weight" on the U.S. economy. "We're going to pull it off the market so it stops burning up our wallets," he declared.

Miss Universe

Six days before the election, Clinton worked to ensure voters would not forget Trump's most damaging moments.

Alicia Machado, a former beauty queen whom Trump has described as "Miss Piggy," introduced the Democratic nominee before her appearance in central Florida.

"He was cruel," Machado said of Trump's criticism of her weight. "For years afterward I was sick, fighting back eating disorders."

Trump spent several days in late September assailing the winner of his 1996 Miss Universe pageant and encouraging his Twitter followers to view her "sex tape," a clip from a reality TV show in which Machado is shown fully covered in a bed with another contestant.

Machado's appearance at the rally was in line with Clinton's broader closing argument against Trump.

"Look at what he does. He calls women ugly, disgusting, nasty, all the time. He calls women pigs, rates bodies on a scale from one to 10," Clinton told the crowd. "He thinks belittling women makes him a bigger man. He doesn't see us as full human beings."

Obama, amid his pitch to working-class voters in Ohio, tried to boil the choice down to a question of character, saying the Oval Office "amplifies who you are. It magnifies who you are. It shows who you are."

"If you disrespected women before you were elected, you will disrespect women once you're president," Obama said.

And speaking directly to men, Obama said "we have to get over the hump" of electing the first female president.

"I just want to be honest with you because she's been out there for so long; sometimes in this culture, we always want to see the new, shiny object," he said.

Clinton also unveiled a television ad set to run in eight battleground states that includes Trump's remark, caught in a 2005 video, that he kissed women and grabbed their genitals without permission.

"The Trump campaign claims their path to White House is through states like these, but we're going to make sure those doors remain shut," said Jesse Ferguson, a Clinton spokesman.

In a statement, Trump's senior communications adviser Jason Miller characterized Clinton's new ad reservations as a defensive move.

"It's notable that in the final week of this campaign, it is actually the Clinton campaign being put on defense and being forced to start advertising in so-called 'blue states' to hold off Mr. Trump's surge in the polls, including two states the Clinton campaign boasted of having put away months ago," Miller said.

In Wisconsin on Tuesday night, Trump urged early voters there who "are having a bad case of buyer's remorse" to change their ballots before Thursday's deadline. Four states -- Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania -- allow early-vote switches, but the practice is extremely rare, according to the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said in a television interview earlier in the day that he has voted for Trump, but had no plans to campaign for him in the final week of the race.

"I stand where I've stood all fall and all summer. In fact, I already voted here in Janesville for our nominee last week in early voting," Ryan said in an interview with Fox News. "We need to support our entire Republican ticket."

On health care, Ryan said the House GOP's plan to repeal and replace the law known as "Obamacare" is "virtually one in the same" with Trump's.

Ryan added that electing Clinton and a Democratic-controlled Congress would be "the worst of all possible things."

Email jabs

Meanwhile, both sides continued to spar over the recent revelation that FBI investigators are again probing emails possibly connected to Clinton.

A lawyer for Clinton aide Huma Abedin said Tuesday that her client learned from media reports Friday that a laptop belonging to her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, might contain some of her emails. The attorney said Abedin has not been contacted by the FBI about the development and that she will cooperate if asked.

"I would rather be here talking about nearly anything else," Clinton said during her Tuesday rally in Florida. "But I can't just talk about all of the good things we want to do."

The revelation has put Democrats on the defensive, at least briefly, and hurt Clinton's plans to promote a positive message over the campaign's final week.

"The Trump campaign is on the offensive and we're expanding our map," Trump aide David Bossie said, suggesting the campaign now sees opportunities to compete in traditional Democratic states such as New Mexico and Michigan.

Speaking to reporters en route to Florida, a senior Clinton aide said that the campaign does not believe the renewed scrutiny by the FBI is hurting Clinton's standing in the polls.

"The race has tightened the way that we thought it would tighten but ... we do not see anything that would suggest that the FBI story is impacting our support," said the aide, who requested anonymity to speak more freely about campaign strategy.

Asked why Clinton is spending so much time in Florida, the aide said: "It's a state that we think we'll win. It's a state that Trump has to win. ... Obviously we don't think he has any path without Florida."

Clinton has sharpened her attack on Trump in recent days and plans to continue to do that today in Arizona, where she'll speak about his record as a divider and her ability to unite the country, the aide said.

The goal, the aide said, is "to reframe and refresh the choice for those voters who [are] in the middle or have gone back and forth between Trump and Clinton."

Separately, the FBI on Tuesday released an archive of documents from a long-closed investigation into Bill Clinton's 2001 presidential pardon of a fugitive financier.

The 129 pages of heavily censored material about Clinton's presidential pardon of Marc Rich were published Monday on the FBI's Freedom of Information Act webpage and noted by one of the bureau's Twitter accounts Tuesday. Earlier in October, the FBI unit published historical files as far back as 1966 about Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump.

The newly released FBI documents are from a 2001 federal investigation into Bill Clinton's pardon at the end of his administration of Rich, who was indicted in 1983 and evaded prosecution in Switzerland. Rich died in 2013.

The files briefly cited the Clinton Foundation in connection with a large donation in support of Clinton's presidential library. The FBI documents cited public records showing that an unidentified person donated to "the William J. Clinton Foundation, a foundation that supports the Clinton presidential library."

Rich's ex-wife, Denise Rich, pledged a $450,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation's project to develop and build the presidential facility. The new FBI archive does not name Denise Rich, but FBI agents sought to talk to her as part of the probe into her former husband's pardon.

The federal probe started under then-U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who now heads the Securities and Exchange Commission for the Obama administration. When White left office in 2002, she was replaced by James Comey, now the FBI director.

The Rich investigation did not lead to federal charges under Comey, and the case was closed in 2005.

Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Lemire, Steve Peoples, Lisa Lerer, Erica Werner, Ken Thomas, Julie Pace, Stephen Braun and Eileen Sullivan of The Associated Press and by Jenna Johnson, John Wagner, Jose A. DelReal, Sean Sullivan, Abby Phillip, Anne Gearan, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement, Paul Kane and Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post.

A Section on 11/02/2016