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WASHINGTON: White House contenders Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John
McCain are rolling up their sleeves for a grueling, five-month slog
to the election as they trade fire over the economy and the
wrenching US housing crisis.
Senator Obama was able to turn a full-bore
offensive on his Republican adversary for the first time Monday
after his rival in the Democratic nomination battle, Sen. Hillary
Clinton, staged an emotional exit from the race at the weekend.
Polls show the US economy is now the top concern
of voters, ahead of the Iraq war, with the May jobless rate posting
its sharpest rise in two decades, the property market in crisis and
fuel prices topping four dollars a gallon.
That was the backdrop to an Obama speech
delivered in the Republican stronghold of North Carolina, showing he
intends to give no quarter to Sen. McCain as both candidates hunt
deep in the other’s territory for moderate voters.
The Illinois senator said that despite mounting
home foreclosures nationwide, President George W. Bush had warned
against political interference in the property market.
“Now, Senator McCain wants to turn Bush’s
policy of ‘too little, too late’ into a policy of ‘even less,
even later’,” he said, pursuing a course of tainting Sen. McCain
by association with the deeply unpopular president.
“He calls himself a fiscal conservative and on
the campaign trail he’s a passionate critic of government
spending,” Obama said in Raleigh at the launch of a two-week
campaign swing devoted to the economy.
“And yet he has no problem spending hundreds
of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a
permanent occupation of Iraq–policies that have left our children
with a mountain of debt.”
McCain hit back by portraying Obama as a
tax-and-spend liberal in the mold of 1970s president Jimmy Carter,
when the last sustained surge in oil prices combined with high
inflation to plunge the US economy into crisis.
“Senator Obama says that I’m running for
Bush’s third term. It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy
Carter’s second,” the Arizona senator said in an interview with
NBC News.
Sen. McCain said Sen. Obama’s policies
amounted to “spend spend” and the Democrat had no record to back
up his soaring rhetoric.
“I have a reputation and a deserved one of
reaching across the aisle and working with Democrats. Senator Obama
has none of that. He has the most liberal voting record in the
Senate,” he said.
On Monday, Sen. Obama said he would place a
windfall profit tax on oil companies that could help ease American
families’ burdens of skyrocketing fuel and food prices if elected.
“The point that Senator Obama has made is that
we need to relieve the middle-class squeeze, the burden on the
middle class with higher food and energy prices, and we also need to
make sure that these enormous [oil company] profits are being
channeled into alternative investments in energy,” Obama campaign
economic advisor Daniel Tarullo said on Fox News.
-- AFP
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