McCain dons underdog's coat in bid to catch up with Obama

Washington: With four days to the presidential election, Republican John McCain is intensifying his underdog message in must-win Ohio, trailing in the polls but promising "we're coming back" in the race against front-running Democrat Barack Obama.

With the economy uppermost in voters' minds, a government report on Thursday showed national output shrinking and consumer spending in decline, erasing lingering doubt the United States was in recession. Obama has opened his lead in the polls by relentlessly linking his opponent to unpopular President George W. Bush, a fellow Republican who is heavily blamed for the financial crisis.

In a morning interview with ABC television yesterday, McCain charged that Obama's economic policies were far to the left of average Americans, claiming his opponent would impose tax increases. Obama has pledged he would only increase tax rates on those earning more than $250,000 (Dh917, 500) and would lower the government's cut from families making less, a group he says makes up 95 per cent of American households.

McCain was rolling through Ohio on his "Straight Talk Express" bus for a second day, making stops in Hanoverton, and then in Columbus with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Aides say the campaign believes he needs to win the state and did not rule out a return before Tuesday.

Obama was spending yesterday campaigning across the Midwest, with a quick stop to see his children in Chicago, before returning to Des Moines, Iowa, the state where he upset Hillary Clinton in the first electoral test of the year before earning the Democratic nomination.

Palin unease

The latest CBS-NY Times national poll released on Thursday put Obama and his running mate Joe Biden at 52 per cent, and McCain and his vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin at 39 per cent.

McCain says he relishes the underdog role and has pulled off come-from-behind wins in the past. He spent part of Thursday in the aptly named town of Defiance, Ohio, as he blasted scepticism about his chances on Tuesday.

"The pundits have written us off, just as they've done several times before," he said. "We're a few points down, but we're coming back."

The new poll indicated escalating public unease about Palin, the conservative governor of Alaska. The number of people who say Palin is not prepared to be vice-president increased from 50 per cent to 59 per cent in the last month. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 per cent.

Obama, who spent millions blanketing the US television networks with a paid political appeal on Wednesday night, continued to hammer home his message of change.

"When the polls close on Tuesday, you don't want to say to yourself, 'Here's something I didn't do, here's an argument I didn't make, here's a hand I didn't shake'," Obama said in an interview with ABC television.

By most independent evidence, the race was Obama's to lose. National polls showed the Democrat with a substantial lead nationwide, and he was rated the favourite in a half-dozen states that sided with Bush in 2004. Surveys showed Obama in close races in three others that went to the incumbent. Also, two other new polls released on Thursday showed the candidates tied in the once reliably Republican state of Indiana.

Lexingon, Kentucky (AFP) Two men faced criminal charges on Thursday for hanging an effigy of Barack Obama from a tree with a noose, the latest in a string of racially tinged incidents targeting the man who hopes to be the first black president.

The effigy hung at the University of Kentucky on Wednesday was seen as particularly offensive because it was reminiscent of the lynchings that once took place in the former slave state.

Its discovery prompted strong rebukes from the Kentucky governor and university president, an apology letter sent to Obama by the Lexington mayor on behalf of the city's residents, and a campus forum.

The two men who turned themselves in to campus police said the effigy was hung in response to the highly publicised effigy of Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin hung from the roof of a California home.

Four students at a small Christian college confessed to hanging an Obama effigy from a tree in Oregon last month, while homeowners in Indiana, Ohio and California have also used Obama effigies as Halloween decorations. Meanwhile, two white supremacists remained jailed in nearby Tennessee for threatening to kill Obama during a "killing spree" of more than 100 African-Americans.

And in late August, the alarm was also raised when it was revealed three men were arrested with a weapons cache in Denver, Colorado, where the Democratic party convention was being held. US attorneys later said there had been no credible threat against Obama.

Obama said on Monday he was not worried about the threats to his life, saying that hate groups have been marginalised by his candidacy.