Fighting hard for Pa. and Fla.

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Sen. and Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain

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Sen. and Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama

Washington Post

BENSALEM, Pa. — Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain took their competing economic messages to two of the country’s biggest electoral prizes Tuesday, with McCain attacking Obama across Pennsylvania for wanting to raise taxes and Obama attending a jobs “summit” with supporters in Florida, a battleground state struck hard by the economic downturn.

In Pennsylvania, McCain sought to link Obama’s shifting baseball allegiances to his tax policy.

“Now, I’m not dumb enough to get mixed up in a World Series between swing states, but I think I may have detected a little pattern with Senator Obama,” McCain said. “It’s pretty simple, really. When he’s campaigning in Philadelphia, he roots for the Phillies, then when he’s campaigning in Tampa Bay, he shows love to the Rays. It’s kind of like the way he campaigns on tax cuts but then votes for tax increases after he’s elected.”

Campaigning in Florida, Obama countered that McCain has offered “little more than willful ignorance, wishful thinking, and outdated ideology” to cope with the nation’s financial crisis.

Both campaigns were playing offense Tuesday, hoping to steal away states that went for the other party’s presidential candidate in 2004. But the day’s events underscored the strategic landscape of the campaign in its final stages, with Obama much closer to moving Florida’s 27 electoral votes into the Democratic column than McCain is in dislodging Pennsylvania’s 21 votes.

McCain campaign officials in Pennsylvania insist the state is still up for grabs despite a double-digit lead by Obama in polls. A large cadre of conservative Democrats and independents are open to McCain’s “independent streak,” said national political director Mike DuHaime. DuHaime also said the campaign has an aggressive program in place to identify one-time supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats and bring them to the polls on Election Day.

In Lake Worth, Fla., Obama gathered in a hot gymnasium for a jobs summit featuring former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, local small-business owners and four supportive Democratic governors from battleground states. The tone was immediately set when some supporters tried to work up a chant when Obama took the stage, only to be reprimanded by the Democrat.

“No cheerleading,” he commanded. “We’ve got serious work to be done.”

The crowd settled down on hard wooden bleachers for more than 11‚Ñ2 hours of sober speechifying about stimulus plans, rebuilding the nation’s electric grid and creating a new “architecture” of jobs based on renewable energy.

Obama tried to link McCain to President Bush, and said both ignored a growing crisis. When it hit, “they were ready to move heaven and earth to address the crisis on Wall Street,” Obama said, but not for Main Street. That’s also an argument McCain has made of Bush in recent days.