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Republican presidential candidate John McCain, trailing in the polls with just more than three weeks left before the election, sought Monday to portray himself as the underdog. McCain acknowledged that he is “six points down,” adding that “the national media has written us off.” “Sen. [Barack] Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and Sen. [Harry] Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections and concede defeat in Iraq,” McCain said. “But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.” In his remarks, McCain said he would keep taxes low, open up free trade agreements and allow and encourage domestic energy production in order to help the economy. The Arizona senator accused Obama of seeking to raise taxes, comparing his Democratic rival to former President Herbert Hoover. McCain’s speech, billed as the beginning of his comeback by some analysts and media outlets, was a call to arms for supporters, as he tries to rally Republican troops despite the Illinois senator's apparent momentum in recent days and weeks. “What America needs in this hour is a fighter — someone who puts all his cards on the table and trusts the judgment of the American people,” McCain said. “I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her. I have fought for you most of my life. There are other ways to love this country, but I’ve never been the kind to do it from the sidelines.” The Obama campaign responded that, instead of offering solutions to the financial crisis, McCain was focusing on polls instead of the economy. Obama was scheduled to give a “major policy address” on the economy Monday afternoon. “Less than 12 hours after his campaign announced that Sen. McCain would finally have some new ideas on the economy, he decided that it was more important to give a new political speech about where he is in the polls,” Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said in a statement. “But the American people know that this election isn’t about who’s up or who’s down; it’s about who will change the disastrous Bush-McCain economic policies of the last eight years.” |
