Barack Obama says his grandmother died Monday.

The Democratic presidential candidate announced the news in a joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. He said his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, had died peacefully after a battle with cancer.

HONOLULU- Barack Obama left the campaign trail Thursday to visit his ailing grandmother, perhaps for the last time.

Although it’s a crucial period in the presidential race, the Democratic candidate said he is making time for the visit because he doesn’t want to risk his grandmother dying before he has a chance to say goodbye – something that happened when his mother succumbed to cancer.

“I want to make sure that I don’t make the same mistake twice,” he said in an interview on CBS’ “The Early Show.”

The campaign has not discussed Madelyn Dunham’s health in detail, but the 85-year-old woman is said to be gravely ill after falling and breaking her hip. Dunham, whose birthday is Sunday, was recently released from the hospital.

At a rally Thursday in Indianapolis, a minister asked the crowd to pray for Dunham as a “source of comfort, healing and courage.”

And in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Obama said his grandmother “has been inundated with phone calls and e-mails and flowers from total strangers.”

“And so maybe she is getting a sense of, of long-deserved recognition at – towards the end of her life,” Obama said. Obama was born in Hawaii. His Kansas-born mother and Kenyan father met as college students there, but Dunham and her husband, Stanley, raised Obama for extended periods when his mother lived overseas.

In his memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama described his grandfather as something of a dreamer. It was his grandmother who was practical enough to support the family by working her way up in the ranks at a local bank.

He has often mentioned “Toot” – his version of the Hawaiian word “tutu,” or grandparent – as an example of a strong woman succeeding through intelligence and determination. Many of his speeches describe her working on a bomber assembly line during World War II.

Obama said the decision to go to Hawaii was easy to make, telling CBS that he “got there too late” when his mother died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at age 53.

Republican John McCain is holding a series of “Joe the Plumber” events aimed at blue-collar workers as he hopes to keep Florida from swinging to Barack Obama.

He’s riding the “Straight Talk Express” from Ormond Beach on the Atlantic Coast to Sarasota on the Gulf Coast, a route that traverses the vote-rich “I-4 Corridor” through central Florida.

McCain also plans to make some informal stops along the way in between the more formal rallies.

Recent polls show McCain and Obama running close, but Obama has been bombarding Florida with TV ads while campaigning with Senator Hillary Clinton.

Early voting in Florida started Monday and about 150,000 people have already cast their ballots.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is addressing the constant criticisms of his tax plan coming from John McCain.

McCain claims Obama wants to redistribute wealth, prompting Obama to start giving a point-by-point rebuttal of those arguments, which he’ll make today in Indiana.
 
In yet another state that voted Republican in 2004, Obama plans to tell voters that it’s he, not McCain, who would provide more new tax relief to middle-class families.

After a morning rally, Obama heads to Hawaii to visit his ill grandmother.

Yesterday in Virginia, Obama said the difference between his plan and McCain’s is in who would actually get a tax cut. He says McCain “is in cahoots with Joe the CEO.”

When Senator Barack Obama announced he would stop campaigning for more than 36 hours starting on Thursday, and would instead fly to Hawaii to visit his gravely ill grandmother, presidential historians noted that it was an unprecedented step for a candidate this close to Election Day, but they differed about the political risks of such a personal decision.

Senator Barack Obama will suspend his campaigning for more than 36 hours this week to visit his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who is gravely ill in Hawaii.