With Fall Vote in View, Obama Assails McCain on Economy

RALEIGH, N.C. — Senator Barack Obama, with the Democratic stage to himself for the first time, began a two-week assault on Senator John McCain’s economic policies in a series of battleground states on Monday, moving to define the general election campaign by focusing on the economy as the central theme.

In a speech at the North Carolina state fairgrounds here, Mr. Obama assailed Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee for president, for what he characterized as a dangerous ignorance of economic matters. His remarks signaled how he plans to pound away at his core argument: that electing Mr. McCain would mean four more years of what he termed the failed economic programs of the Bush administration.

Mr. Obama used the address to reach out to lower-income and lesser-educated Americans who rejected him in the Democratic primaries in favor of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who formally conceded the race on Saturday and pledged her support for Mr. Obama.

The speech came at the start of a tour that suggested where the Obama campaign saw the key battlegrounds in November: Monday’s speech was in North Carolina, which has long voted for Republican presidential candidates but which has a large black population, and he will be traveling to Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida to press the economic theme.

In his remarks on Monday. Mr. Obama spoke of hard-pressed workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana struggling to pay their bills and afford gasoline for their cars. He laid the blame squarely at the feet of President Bush and his Republican enablers, including Senator McCain.

“We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history,” Mr. Obama said to an invitation-only audience here. “This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid. It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”

He added a moment later: “We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well, we’ve been there once. Were not going back.”

The pieces of the economic program that Mr. Obama laid out on Monday are not new, but the context assuredly is. This is the first full week of the general election campaign and Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are beginning what promises to be an aggressive fight over the economy and the Iraq war.

Mr. Obama, by announcing a two-week tour to stress economic issues, chose the ground for the first battles in this general election contest, shoving Iraq and national security matters, where Mr. McCain has far more experience, to the background for now.

Mr. McCain, who is attending fund-raising events in Washington and Virginia on Monday, issued a statement belittling the Obama speech.

“While hardworking families are hurting and employers are vulnerable, Barack Obama has promised higher income taxes, Social Security taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes and tax hikes on job-creating businesses,” a McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds, said in a statement issued before Mr. Obama’s remarks. “Barack Obama doesn’t understand the American economy and that’s change we just can’t afford.”

Mr. Obama spoke to an audience of 900 invited guests, including a number of Democratic governors in town for a conference on education. He was introduced by Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, who had previously endorsed and enthusiastically supported Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama decisively won North Carolina’s Democratic primary last month.

Before Mr. Obama delivered his remarks, Pamela Cash-Roper, an unemployed nurse, spoke of her family’s economic pain caused by a series of medical crises. Mrs. Cash-Roper, who described herself as a lifelong Republican, said she turned to government for help, “but help was nowhere to be seen.” She said she was supporting Mr. Obama because he had been working for “hard-working Americans like us for more than two decades.”

In his remarks, Mr. Obama proposed a series of short-term measures to relieve the hardships of American families and rescue the economy from the brink of recession.

He advocated an additional $50 billion in immediate fiscal stimulus, expansion of unemployment benefits and relief for homeowners facing foreclosure. He proposed new rules to prevent mortgage and credit card fraud and urged tax reductions for middle-income families and retirees.

Advisers to Mr. Obama said all of the new programs would be paid for by a combination of tax increases, elimination of waste and savings from the drawdown of American troops in Iraq. He has said in the past that he would allow the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration to expire and impose higher taxes on some investment income.

Mr. Obama posed the difference between him and Mr. McCain as a fundamental choice between the future and the past, the ground on which he hopes to fight the general election campaign.

“That is the choice we face right now — a choice between more of the same policies that have widened inequality, added to our debt, and shaken the foundation of our economy — or change that will restore balance to our economy; that will invest in the ingenuity and innovation of our people; that will fuel a bottom-up prosperity to keep America strong and competitive in the 21st century,” he said near the end of his 40-minute address.

“It is not an argument between left or right, liberal or conservative, to say that we have tried it their way for eight long years and it has failed,” he added. “It is time to try something new. It is time for a change.”

Mr. Obama delivered the now-requisite praise for Mr. McCain’s years of service in the military and in government. But the generosity quickly gave way to a harsh attack on Mr. McCain’s economic theories and credentials.

On economic matters, Mr. Obama said: “John McCain and I have a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country. Because for all his talk of independence, the centerpiece of his economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush’s policies. He says we’ve made great progress in our economy these past eight years. He calls himself a fiscal conservative and on the campaign trail he’s a passionate critic of government spending, and yet he has no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a permanent occupation of Iraq policies that have left our children with a mountain of debt.”