Obama mocks rival for shunning Bush

RENO, Nev. | Sen. Barack Obama returned to the presidential campaign trail Saturday promising to pull the country out of an economic tailspin and accusing his rival, Republican Sen. John McCain, of feigning differences with President Bush in a desperate bid to sway voters 10 days before the presidential election.

While Mr. McCain attempted to turn a gaffe by Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. against the Democratic ticket, Mr. Obama mocked his opponent’s attempt to distance himself from Mr. Bush and the past eight years of a Republican administration.

Both men spent Saturday campaigning in Western swing states that narrowly backed Mr. Bush in 2004 but are tipping toward the Democrat this year.

Mr. Obama referred to a McCain interview with The Washington Times last week in which the Arizonan criticized President Bush and the formerly Republican-controlled Congress on a litany of issues, saying, “We just let things get completely out of hand.”

“That’s right, John McCain has been really angry about George Bush’s economic policies - except during the primaries, when he said we’ve made ’great progress economically’ under George Bush,” Mr. Obama said. “Or just last month, when he said that the ’fundamentals of our economy are strong.’ In fact, John McCain is so opposed to George Bush’s policies that he voted with him 90 percent of the time for the past eight years.

“That’s right, he decided to really stick it to him - 10 percent of the time,” Mr. Obama told the cheering rally of about 11,000 supporters at a baseball park at the University of Nevada at Reno.

At an afternoon rally in Las Vegas, Mr. Obama said Mr. McCain’s recent rebuke of the Bush administration was “like Tonto attacking the Lone Ranger.”

Campaigning in New Mexico, Mr. McCain again referred to remarks last week by Mr. Biden, in which he told campaign donors in Seattle that enemy nations would concoct an international crisis to test Mr. Obama.

“Mark my words,” Mr. Biden said. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here, if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

But Mr. McCain said he would “test” enemy countries when elected president, rather than the other way around

“I’m going to test them; they’re not going to test me,” Mr. McCain told a rally in Albuquerque, N.M.

The senator from Arizona has seized on the Biden remarks as evidence that Mr. Obama would make the country less safe, including devoting much of his campaign stump speech to responding.

Mr. Obama has said the famously gaffe-prone Mr. Biden was just using one of his “rhetorical flourishes,” and that he thinks either new president would be tested by enemy nations.

Mr. McCain has grown bolder in distancing himself from the unpopular president. On Saturday, his campaign explicitly linked Mr. Obama to Bush policies.

“Americans would have been better off if Barack Obama hadn’t joined with the president to vote for virtually every Bush spending bill, voting for the Bush-Cheney energy bill and doubling down on the Bush administration legacy of out-of-control spending,” said campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds. “Obama is just more of the same.”

Mr. Obama laughed at such claims, noting Saturday during his Reno speech that Mr. Bush already had voted - for Mr. McCain.

“Senator McCain has been throwing everything he’s got at us, hoping something will stick,” said the senator from Illinois.

Polls show Mr. Obama leading by as much as five percentage points in Nevada and 13 points in New Mexico, where he was scheduled to attend a rally late Saturday evening.

Mr. Obama continues his Western swing Sunday in Colorado. Other than Bill Clinton in 1992, Colorado hasn’t backed a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. But Mr. Obama consistently leads state polls by four or five percentage points, with one poll giving him a 13-point lead.

He is also slightly ahead in a half-dozen other swing states that usually vote Republican in presidential races, cementing his front-runner status at this late stage of the campaign.

Mr. McCain has used the polling to play up the “underdog” angle. On Saturday, he ridiculed Mr. Obama after the New York Times reported that the Democrat’s transition-team chief, John D. Podesta, has already drafted a sample inaugural address for Mr. Obama.

“An awful lot of voters are still undecided, but he’s decided for them, ’Well, why wait?’ ” Mr. McCain said.

“I want him to save that manuscript of his inaugural address and donate it to the Smithsonian, so they can put it right next to the Chicago paper that says, ’Dewey Defeats Truman,’ ” Mr. McCain said, referring to the presidential race of 1948.

Mr. McCain also has tried to gain ground by criticizing Mr. Obama for his “socialist” tax plan that would raise taxes on the wealthy and on small-business owners such as “Joe the Plumber.”

The Republican presidential nominee has hammered Mr. Obama for pursuing a socialist agenda since the Democrat told Joseph Wurzelbacher, an Ohio plumber worried about higher taxes if he buys a plumbing business, that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Mr. McCain and the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, mention “Joe the Plumber” often on the stump, and a new TV ad features a series of voters saying, “I’m Joe the Plumber.” For the McCain campaign, Mr. Wurzelbacher has become an “everyman” symbol for small-business owners who will be hit by Mr. Obama’s “soak-the-rich” tax plan.

Mr. McCain also warned that a Democratic Congress, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, together with a President Obama, would let the Democratic Party’s worst instincts reign unchecked.

“But that is exactly what’s going to happen if the Democrats have total control of Washington. We can’t let that happen. Are you ready for Obama, Pelosi and Reid?” said the senator from Arizona.

Mr. Obama, who took Friday off from campaigning to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii, returned to the campaign stump Saturday to rail against the country’s financial woes, which he blamed on the Bush administration and vowed to fix with populist remedies such as middle-class tax relief and New Deal-style public works projects.

“There’s been a lot of talk about taxes in this campaign. And the truth is, my opponent and I are both proposing tax cuts,” Mr. Obama said. “The difference is, he wants to give a $700,000 tax cut to the average Fortune 500 CEO. I want to put a middle-class tax cut in the pockets of 95 percent of workers and their families. My opponent doesn’t want you to know this, but under my plan, tax rates will actually be less than they were under Ronald Reagan.”

Mr. Obama said the tax cuts would benefit “98 percent of small-business owners, and that includes plumbers.”

The Obama campaign also released a two-minute television ad to run in key states that echoes a famous rhetorical question from decades ago, one credited with helping Mr. Reagan “close the deal” over President Carter in 1980. “Will our country be better off four years from now?” the ad asks.

At his Las Vegas rally, the candidate told his audience not to be convinced by any McCain attempt to distance himself from Mr. Bush.

“We are not going to let George Bush pass the torch to John McCain, and we are not going to let John McCain hide from his 26 years” supporting Republican policies, Mr. Obama said at Bonanza High School.

As he has at each campaign stop in red states this week, Mr. Obama worked to energize his supporters and drive vote totals in areas such as Reno, where he has a strong lead. A Politico/Insider Advantage poll this week showed Mr. Obama with a 10-point lead in Reno, but tied statewide with Mr. McCain at 47 percent.

“We are going to have to struggle and fight for each of these 10 days,” he told the Reno audience. “We know change doesn’t come without a fight.”

The Obama campaign announced Saturday that the candidate will make his first joint appearance with former President Bill Clinton later this week, at a rally in Orlando, Fla. Mr. Clinton is the only Democratic presidential candidate to have won Florida in the past 30 years.

S.A. Miller traveled with the Obama campaign in Nevada and New Mexico. Stephen Dinan traveled with the McCain campaign in New Mexico.