WASHINGTON: Democrat Barack Obama yesterday was lashing out at Republican John McCain as little more than a clone of unpopular President George W. Bush, opening the final week of America’s presidential campaign with a “closing argument” speech in battleground Ohio.
McCain, promising a comeback victory, also was to speak in Ohio and was repeating his characterization of Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. He later was traveling to neighboring Pennsylvania.
With the US economic decline accelerating, national and state polls showed McCain’s route to victory narrowing, forcing him to defend states like Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida — regions once seen as solidly Republican but now shading toward Obama.
Obama is projected as near or above the 270 electoral votes needed to become the 44th US president and the first African-American to hold the job. The presidency is won state-by-state, with a state’s number of electoral votes roughly tied to its population.
In his Canton, Ohio, summing-up, Obama will make a pitch for national unity in a time of extreme partisanship. “In one week, you can put an end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election; that tries to pit region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat; that asks us to fear at a time when we need hope,” Obama planned to say, according speech excerpts released by his campaign.
But partisanship holds its place in the message, as Obama hits McCain as a candidate of the past. “After twenty-one months and three debates, Sen. McCain still has not been able to tell the American people a single major thing he’d do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy,” the 47-year-old Democrat says. “Sen. McCain says that we can’t spend the next four years waiting for our luck to change, but you understand that the biggest gamble we can take is embracing the same old Bush-McCain policies that have failed us for the last eight years.” Obama — widely favored in the polls as best qualified to cope with America’s boiling economic crisis — planned the bold summing up after drawing huge crowds on Sunday in Colorado, a state that voted twice for Bush but where most polls now show Obama with a lead. Tomorrow, he will air a 30-minute commercial on national broadcast networks in a bid to sway independent voters, an estimated 25 percent of the American electorate.
Discounting Obama as overly confident, McCain said in an NBC television interview on Sunday, that his campaign had picked up strength last week and that “we’ll continue to be very competitive in many of the battleground states.”
The former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war dismissed troubling poll numbers, declaring he could “guarantee you that two weeks from now you will see this has been a very close race. And I believe that I’m going to win it.”
Even so, Obama drew huge crowds the same day. More than 100,000 people turned out in Denver, the capital of Colorado, a traditionally Republican bastion, where Obama seized on McCain’s statement that he and Bush — as fellow Republicans — shared some aspects of economic philosophy.
“We know what the Bush-McCain philosophy looks like,” Obama said.
“It’s a philosophy that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that it trickles down.” McCain began on Sunday in Iowa where he is looking to make up lost ground. At a rally in Cedar Falls, he said that voters should elect him president to create a check on a Democratic Congress that he says is determined to increase taxes and the size of government.
