New Economic Plan is Offered By Obama ELECTIONS 2008

By Jackie Calmes, Jeff Zeleny and Brian Knowlton

21 days to the vote

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With his presidential campaign gaining momentum on a tide of economic worries, Senator Barack Obama is adding emergency planks to an economic platform that he says is designed to help average Americans, and not just Wall Street, through the downturn.

The Democratic nominee proposed steps to spur new jobs, give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings during the downturn, declare a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and lend money to strapped local and state governments.

“I’m proposing a number of steps that we should take immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities and help struggling homeowners,” Obama said at a rally in Toledo. “It’s a plan that begins with one word that’s on everyone’s mind, and it’s spelled J-O-B-S.”

The speech provided a strong contrast to the approach of Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, who also gave an economic speech Monday, even as polls showed him trailing significantly and some worried Republicans were urging him to enunciate a much clearer message and put up a greater fight.

Indeed, McCain struck a feisty new tone in a speech in Virginia Beach, Virginia, saying that the presidential race was far from over.

“The national media has written us off,” McCain said, adding that Obama “is measuring the drapes,” and planning with Democrats in Congress to “raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections and concede defeat in Iraq. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.”

McCain, while portraying himself as a never-say-die underdog, offered no new policy prescriptions. The senator rejected his advisers’ options during the weekend as too gimmicky, according to a Republican close to the campaign.

Obama was not originally scheduled to present new policy proposals. But polls suggest that mounting economic anxieties among voters are fueling his growing lead in many polls. So when word spread Sunday that McCain was not planning to offer new economic proposals, as some of his aides had suggested, the Obama campaign saw an opportunity.

The Democratic candidate outlined his revised plan in Toledo, a struggling Ohio city that is at ground zero for the economic crisis and that is in one of the industrial-belt swing states that could determine the Nov. 4 election.

Obama advisers said the steps he proposed Monday could be done before the next president takes office, either through current laws or by the Democratic-controlled Congress acting in the final days of the Bush administration.

“He’s calling for this to happen as quickly as possible,” Jason Furman, a top Obama economic adviser, said in a conference call with reporters. “It’s certainly something that could be done in a lame- duck session of Congress.”

Obama also is calling for doubling, by another $25 billion, the government loan guarantees for automakers, and temporarily eliminating taxes on unemployment benefits.

But with McCain portraying Obama as a free-spending, tax- friendly liberal, the costs of such options are not irrelevant. Furman estimated that the four main proposals would cost $60 billion. But he said that an earlier Obama economic plan, originally figured to cost $50 billion, would now cost $115 billion, since the sharp fall in oil prices would effectively cancel any benefit from a proposed windfall profit tax on oil corporations.

Furman said Obama still planned to cut taxes for all but the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, saying, “Senator Obama believes he can’t afford not to keep his promise to cut taxes for 95 percent of families.”

A new ABC-Washington Post survey gives Obama a 10-point lead, an advantage that history would indicate is nearly, if not quite, insurmountable at this point in a presidential election. For the first time in that poll, voters gave the Democratic candidate a clear advantage on tax policy and on strong leadership.

The poll also showed a dramatic increase in voters’ negative views of the Republican candidate, fanning debate in his party as to whether his more negative ads and speeches had harmed or helped him more.

The pool of undecided voters – those McCain will have to sway if he is to make up lost ground – has dwindled to just 13 percent, the survey found.

McCain’s campaign has been working to fashion a message cohesive and potent enough to halt his recent slide.

The senator’s message in Virginia – a state where, historically, Republican candidates should not have to be campaigning at this point – was that the world is living through exceptionally dangerous times and that only he, not Obama, could be trusted to lead.

“I’m not afraid of the fight, I’m ready for it,” he said. He used the word “fight” or “fighting” some 20 times.

McCain employed a similarly scrappy tone on Sunday when he vowed, in reference to the two men’s final debate, “We’re going to spend a lot of time, and after I whip his you-know-what in this debate, we’re going to be going out 24/7.”

The final debate will take place Wednesday at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York. In a normal election year it would provide a trailing candidate with his last best chance – barring a major unforeseen development – to change the dynamics of a race.

Some Republican leaders say McCain has not been clear or focused enough on the economy and want him to concentrate on that in the debate. They are divided on whether he should reinforce efforts to link Obama to his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or to William Ayers, the onetime leader of the radical Weather Underground. Obama has denounced views held by both men.

McCain’s troubles appear to have started around the time last month when he suspended his campaign to deal with the financial crisis, then reversed himself and appeared anyway in the first presidential debate.

Because of the suspension, he canceled an appearance on the popular television talk show “Late Show” with David Letterman – and faced withering sarcasm from Letterman for doing so.

But the Republican candidate will have a second chance. Letterman told viewers last week that, “in an attempt to save his campaign, they’re talking about coming back.”

CBS now says that McCain will join Letterman on Thursday, the day after the final debate.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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