Obama and McCain step up election battleground blitz

With just four days left before Tuesday’s presidential ballot, front-runner Obama was to hold campaign rallies in the midwestern states of Iowa and Indiana while McCain was wrapping up a two-day bus tour of Ohio.

On Thursday the two candidates traded body-blows after grim new figures showed the world’s largest economy is staring at recession.

The U.S. government said the economy had shrunk by 0.3 percent in the third quarter through September, its worst contraction since 2001.

McCain’s campaign insisted the bleak economic outlook would be made even worse by an Obama administration, saying his opponent would raise taxes on small businesses and so stifle growth and kill jobs.

“Today’s announcement ... confirms what Americans already knew: the economy is shrinking,” McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said in a statement. “Barack Obama would accelerate this dangerous course.”

But Obama, 47, bidding to become the first black U.S. president, pounced on the news to say his rival would pursue what he called failed Republican policies promulgated by President George W. Bush.

“If you want to know where John McCain will drive this economy, just look in the rear-view mirror. Because when it comes to our economic policies, John McCain has been right next to George Bush,” Obama said.

The latest national poll by the New York Times and CBS News gave Obama a yawning lead of 11 points among likely voters — 52 percent to 41 for McCain.

On Thursday McCain wheeled out Ohio tradesman Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, better known as “Joe the Plumber,” to buttress his case in a state that he must win if he is to take the White House.

No U.S. president has been elected without winning Ohio since 1960, and Obama is ahead in state polls.

McCain was to call on former movie star turned California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to campaign alongside him in Ohio on Friday, before heading to Pennsylvania.

Obama was enlisting former vice president Al Gore to campaign for him in Florida, where the anti-global warming crusader suffered his agonizing loss in the 2000 election to Bush.

After his Iowa event, the Democrat was to break for a Halloween visit to his two young daughters in Chicago before heading to an evening rally in Highland, Indiana, just over the Illinois border.

Obama has a decisive polling lead in Iowa, which was won by Bush last time. Conservative Indiana has rarely been friendly territory to Democratic presidential aspirants, but McCain is barely ahead in polls there.

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