McCain, Obama begin final battle

Barack Obama and John McCain on Monday started the first full week of their head-to-head battle for the November presidential election, both intent on redrafting the US political landscape. After Hillary Clinton’s exit from the primary race and fulsome endorsement of Mr Obama on Saturday, supporters of the Democrat and his Republican rival hammered two of the defining themes for the presidential election: the economy and Iraq. “The fact is that John McCain voted 95 per cent of the time with (President) George W. Bush in 2007, and 90 per cent of the time with George W. Bush over the entire presidency,” said John Kerry, the Democrats’ defeated nominee in 2004. “That’s not a change. That’s not reform. That’s not a difference,” the Massachusetts senator told ABC News.

Mr McCain backers cast Mr Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal whose first instinct was to thrust big government into every corner of US society. His inspirational oratory had no substantive underpinnings, they said. “When it comes to Senator Obama, it’s all talk,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said. “(He) never did anything the left didn’t want to hear, whether Iraq policy or anything else, and John has been his own man for a long time,” he said, touting the Arizona senator’s maverick appeal to independent voters. But Mr Obama, 46, is not ceding the centrist electorate that could well decide who succeeds Mr Bush, who officially stands down in January.

The Illinois senator’s itinerary takes him far from Democratic strongholds, giving an insight into his strategy to become the nation’s first black President. On Monday Mr Barack Obama launched a two-week, nationwide economic tour starting in North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential hopeful since 1976. The tour takes Mr Obama on Tuesday to Missouri, which has not chosen a Democrat since voting for Bill Clinton in 1996, having already visited Virginia last week (previous Democratic victory: 1964). Both candidates rolled out biographical television spots to re-introduce themselves to voters after the gruelling primary season.

Mr Obama’s story is of a mixed-race trailblazer who, he says, personifies hope and the American dream. Mr McCain, 71, is the grizzled veteran and war hero who survived five years of torture during captivity in Vietnam. Opinion polls indicate that more than 80 per cent of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction, a signal of a problem for the party in power.

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