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McCain vows to come back

Fresh News October 15, 2008

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 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.

“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,” McCain said. Ahead of Wednesday’s third and final presidential debate, polls suggested McCain’s all-out offensive on Obama’s character had flopped, with the Democrat now sitting on a double-digit lead overall. A Quinnipiac University poll on Tuesday said Obama had solidified his lead over McCain with 51-54 per cent support in four key battleground states, and now leads or ties McCain among white voters for the first time in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. “Senator Obama’s leads in these four battleground states are as large as they have been the entire campaign,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Those margins may be insurmountable barring a reversal that has never been seen before in the modern era in which polling monitors public opinion throughout the campaign.”

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. 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.

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 middle-class 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, penalty-free withdrawals from savers’ retirement accounts, and rolled out a $3,000 tax credit for every job created by a company in the United States.

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 middle-class 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.