GREEN, Ohio — John McCain’s campaign continued to hammer away at Barack Obama’s economic plan Wednesday, while Obama said its attacks smelled of desperation.
Again invoking “Joe the Plumber,” McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, reminded a rally of perhaps 15,000 people at a high school football field here that Obama had told the Toledo plumber he wants to “spread the wealth around.”
McCain, speaking earlier at a rally of 3,000 at a hockey arena in Manchester, N.H., used Obama’s best-selling book to try show that the Illinois senator’s policies are out of the mainstream.
“Readers of his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’ might recall that he wrote about the need to ‘spread the wealth around’ there too,” McCain said. “He writes of the need for ‘labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth.’ He has talked elsewhere about how, in our day, ‘the distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequity are now higher.’ ”
Obama, in Richmond, Va., said those remarks signified a losing campaign that was running out of time.
“They have been trying to throw whatever they can up against the wall to see what sticks,” he said. “They have run out of ideas.”
Obama told about 13,000 supporters at the Richmond Coliseum that “in the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over.
“We’ve seen it before, and we’re seeing it again today. The ugly phone calls. The misleading mail and TV ads. The careless, outrageous comments,” he said. “All aimed at keeping us from working together, all aimed at stopping change.”
Obama leads in Virginia by an average of 7 percentage points in public polls, but his lead has narrowed slightly in the past week.
He’s trying to become the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the Old Dominion since 1964.
Earlier in the day, McCain stumped in New Hampshire, hoping that a state that salvaged his White House aspirations in 2000 and earlier this year can come through for him again on Election Day.
“I know one thing for certain: It doesn’t matter what the pundits said or how confident my opponent is,” the Arizona senator told supporters who packed the college ice-hockey arena. “The people of New Hampshire make their own decisions, and more than once, they’ve ignored the polls and the pundits and brought me across the finish line first.”
