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WILMINGTON, North Carolina: In a career littered with comebacks,
Republican John McCain is now vowing one more Herculean effort to
overhaul Barack Obama’s commanding poll lead and restore his White
House dream.
While the Democratic hopeful for the November 4
election was Monday rolling out a costly new plan to kick-start the
US economy, McCain went back to basics in extolling his own record
of heroism and service to a crisis-torn nation.
“I have been written off on so many occasions
by political pundits that it’s hard for me to count,” he told
CNN after delivering a retooled stump speech that portrayed Obama as
dangerously inexperienced for the challenges at hand.
“I think it is more lives than a cat. But the
point is, we are doing fine. I’m happy with where we are. We are
fighting the good fight. That’s what it is all about. That’s
what I love,” McCain said.
Ahead of Thursday’s third and final
presidential debate, the latest clutch of polls suggested McCain’s
all-out offensive on Obama’s character has flopped with the
Democrat now sitting on a double-digit lead overall.
The latest iteration of McCain’s campaign
address, delivered in the suddenly at-risk Republican strongholds of
North Carolina and Virginia, dropped some of the more inflammatory
attacks on Obama of recent days.
Instead, he said, Obama was being presumptuous
in already “measuring the drapes” for the White House.
“But they forgot to let you decide. My
friends, we’ve got them just where we want them,” McCain
insisted, having already come back once after his campaign for the
Republican nomination looked dead and buried in mid-2007.
“I come from a long line of McCains who
believed that to love America is to fight for her,” the former
Vietnam prisoner of war added.
“I have fought for you most of my life. There
are other ways to love this country, but I’ve never been the kind
to do it from the sidelines.”
Radical talk
However, the Republican’s campaign was again
forced on the back foot after reports that the chairman of the
Virginia Republican Party had compared Obama to al-Qaeda mastermind
Osama bin Laden.
Obama and bin Laden “both have friends that
bombed the Pentagon,” state lawmaker Jeffrey Frederick told
Virginia campaign volunteers, according to Time magazine, in a
reference to 1960s radical William Ayers.
McCain, giving a pep talk to campaign workers in
Washington’s Virginia suburbs, also vowed to “whip” Obama’s
“you know what” in Wednesday’s final presidential debate.
Staying on course
Obama said he would not be distracted from the
issues as he laid out a plan costing up to $175 billion over two
years to right the tottering US economy.
The Democrat welcomed spectacular gains by
global stock markets after New York’s Dow index staged its biggest
rally in 75 years in response to western governments pumping
hundreds of billions of dollars into credit-starved banks.
But he added in a statement: “We have not yet
solved the financial crisis and we have barely even begun to solve
the crisis facing middleclass families struggling to pay their bills
and stay in their homes.
“So we must move forward, quickly and
aggressively, with a middle-class rescue plan that will create jobs,
provide relief to families, help homeowners and restore our
financial system,” Obama said.
In Toledo, Ohio, the Illinois senator proposed a
90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, a new lending facility for
US states and cities, and penalty-free withdrawals from savers’
retirement accounts.
He also rolled out a $3,000 tax credit for every
job created by a company in the United States, hitting populist
buttons in a state where the NAFTA free-trade agreement for North
America has become a four-letter word. NAFTA is the North American
Free Trade Agreement, a pact among the US, Canada and Mexico.
In Pennsylvania, Obama’s vanquished primary
rival Hillary Clinton said his election as president combined with a
bigger lock on Congress by the Democrats was essential to restoring
middleclass prosperity.
“It comes down to this: jobs, baby, jobs,”
the former first lady said, riffing on the Republican chant of
“drill baby drill” as an answer to America’s energy crisis.
But McCain’s economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin
said Obama’s latest proposals were rife with “hypocrisy.”
The Democrat was still pushing “tax increases,
explosive spending proposals, expensive health mandates, a weak
energy policy and protectionist trade inclinations,” he told
reporters.
-- AFP
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