McCain calls liberals a threat to economy

John McCain with economic advisers (from left) former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, Mitt Romney, and JL Steel CEO Lou Anne Regerat in Cleveland. (Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images)

CLEVELAND - Republican John McCain, casting next week's presidential election along partisan and ideological lines, yesterday portrayed Democrat Barack Obama as an old-fashioned liberal who would govern as a dangerous extension of his party's congressional leadership.

"Now this election comes down to how you want your hard-earned money spent," McCain told an audience in a Cleveland hotel ballroom after a meeting with political and business figures he considers his economic advisers, including former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

"Do you want to keep it and invest it in your future, or have it taken by the most liberal person to ever run for the presidency and the Democratic leaders - the most liberal, who have been running Congress for the past two years, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?" McCain went on, to boos. "You know, my friends, this is a dangerous threesome."

As he shapes his concluding argument to voters with just a week until Election Day, McCain's campaign has worked furiously to exploit distrust of incumbent Washington - South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has been exhorting supporters to "take your country back." And McCain has continued to distance himself from the Republican administration, while Obama has sought to blur any distinction, referring Sunday to a "Bush-McCain philosophy."

"We both disagree with President Bush on economic policy," McCain said. "The difference is that he thinks taxes have been too low, and I think that spending has been too high."

The remarks inaugurated a final phase in the campaign in which advisers said McCain - implicitly acknowledging that Democrats are likely to strengthen their hold on both chambers of Congress - would offer himself up as a bulwark against the hazards of single-party dominance of the legislative and executive branches.

"We're going to take a beating in the House and Senate. We're big boys and girls and frankly we deserve it," said Michael Steele, the chairman of GOPAC, a conservative group, and one of those who appeared with McCain yesterday.

"The last two or three years, the American people have gotten into a comfort zone of having divided government," he said. "It's part and parcel of this campaign: Tell voters what the consequences are."

Delivered with little advance warning to the media as Obama prepared to present his own "closing argument" at his own event 60 miles away, McCain's address offered no new policy details or prescriptions. Instead, McCain articulated in his most dire terms yet what has become the dominant theme of his campaign in the last two weeks: that Obama's plans to raise income taxes and fine companies that do not provide employee health insurance would be obstacles to small-business growth, and kill jobs just when new ones are needed most. "It's a difference of millions of jobs in America, and Americans are beginning to figure that out," he said. "With one week left in this campaign, the choice facing Americans is stark."

McCain has had greater difficulty sketching that choice in clear ideological terms since the emergence of a national credit crisis in September, his advisers acknowledge, given that both he and Obama voted for a $700 billion financial-services bailout.

Yesterday McCain challenged Obama for not backing a plan for the Treasury Department to use nearly half that bailout money to buy up individual mortgages. And he criticized Bush in broader terms for being passive in response to economic concerns.

"We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: spending ourselves into a ditch and hoping that the consequences don't come," McCain said later, in an afternoon rally in Kettering, outside Dayton.

McCain also pressed his case that his long public career has prepared him to govern during a period of economic troubles, much as he has argued elsewhere that he is more ready than Obama to handle the country's national-security challenges.

McCain has not historically campaigned as a messenger of sharp philosophical distinctions, and through much of the campaign he identified wasteful spending as the most urgent economic problem facing the country. Advisers said McCain was obliged now to define his differences with Obama in ideological terms to remind voters that "this is a big election," as Graham put it in an interview.

"I don't think they've been as apparent as they could be," Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, said of the ideological differences between McCain and Obama. "To be honest, in the cloud of this economic turmoil, a lot of things got lost in translation."

As a result, McCain has worked harder to portray Obama as outside the mainstream of American thought on economic issues. At two rallies yesterday, McCain read from a 2001 interview in which he claimed that Obama said it was a "tragedy" that the Supreme Court had not pursued the "redistribution of wealth."

McCain senior policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said in a statement: "Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change."

The Obama campaign said that the quotes were taken out of context, and distributed an article from the Politico newspaper in which an informal adviser, Cass Sunstein, defended Obama by saying "the irony of it [is] he's basically taking the side of the conservatives then and now against the liberals."

But in Pottsville, Pa., last night, McCain didn't appreciate that irony.

"Senator Obama is running to be redistributionist in chief. I'm running to be commander in chief," McCain said. "Senator Obama is running to spread the wealth. I'm running to create more wealth. Senator Obama is running to punish the successful. I'm running to make everyone successful."