Obama, McCain sharpen strategies

Both major presidential candidates sharpened the focus of their campaigns for the final three-week dash on Tuesday, with Sen. Barack Obama offering a detailed economic recovery program and Sen. John McCain unveiling a fiery new stump speech that stresses his service to the nation and his will to fight.

After weeks of offering mainly generalities about the financial crisis on Wall Street, Mr. Obama used a campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio, to lay out a $60 billion plan that would include a 90-day foreclosure moratorium for certain homeowners and allow Americans to withdraw up to $10,000 from their retirement accounts without penalty through the end of next year.

He also called for a $3,000 tax credit for each additional full-time job a business creates. That means a business that adds five jobs would get a $15,000 break. That incentive would end after 2010 and would cost $40 billion, the campaign estimates.

Mr. Obama said Congress could enact the proposals quickly in a special session later this year. Failing that, the administration could use its regulatory powers to put them into effect.

“We can restore a sense of fairness and balance that will give every American a fair shot at the American dream. And, above all, we can restore confidence - confidence in America, confidence in our economy and confidence in ourselves,” he said during his only campaign event of the day.

Mr. McCain, meanwhile, pirouetted away from the sharp criticism of Mr. Obama that has characterized his recent appearances to stress his own integrity and experience - even while distancing himself from the economic policies of President Bush.

After a nearly monthlong slide in the polls, and with anxious Republicans - including some of his own campaign staff - expressing doubts about his strategy, Mr. McCain energetically declared that his underdog status left him positioned to surprise the prognosticators just as he did in the primaries.

“My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them,” the smiling candidate told thousands of cheering supporters at a rally in the battleground state of Virginia, a once-reliable red state that is now tilting blue.

“Let me give you the state of the race today: We have 22 days to go. We’re six points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes,” Mr. McCain said in Virginia Beach, where he was joined by his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin.

Whipping the crowd into a frenzy, he yelled: “Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. America is worth fighting for. Nothing is inevitable here. We never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.

“Now, let’s go win this election and get this country moving again.”

Mr. Obama, whose election prospects have risen as the economy has sunk, stressed the financial problems of families in his Toledo speech.

“It’s getting harder and harder to make the mortgage, or fill up your gas tank, or even keep the electricity on at the end of the month,” he said to a crowd of about 3,000. “At this rate, the question isn’t just ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ It’s ‘Are you better off than you were four weeks ago?’ ”

In a departure, however, he acknowledged that the economic crisis was caused in part by families running up huge debts. “Part of the reason this crisis occurred, if we’re honest with ourselves, is that everyone was living beyond their means - from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street,” he said.

Proposing to “give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet,” he said his proposed moratorium on foreclosures would apply to homeowners who are living in their homes and making good-faith efforts to make their mortgage payments.

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