LONDONDERRY, N.H. — The final presidential debate may be over, but the feisty encounter between Barack Obama and John McCain carried over to the campaign trail Thursday as the rivals started the sprint to election day.
Obama, stumping for votes in a bucolic apple orchard here, told supporters that McCain showed at the final debate that he is more interested in attacking Obama's candidacy than in the struggles of hardworking Americans as the nation sinks into its greatest economic crises since the Depression.
"Here's what Sen. McCain doesn't seem to understand," Obama told 4,100 supporters at a drizzly afternoon rally in front of a grove of flame-red and gold-tinged trees. "With the economy in turmoil and the American dream at risk, the American people don't want to hear politicians attack each other. You want to hear about how we're going to attack the challenges facing the middle class each and every day."
Obama was referring to the Wednesday debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., where the rivals had their sharpest exchange of their three meetings. McCain questioned Obama's relationship with William Ayers, who founded a radical 1960s group that detonated bombs at the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. Obama responded that he had denounced those acts, was a child when they occurred, and merely served on a bipartisan panel with Ayers, who is now an education professor in Chicago.
An energized McCain, rallying supporters in Downingtown, Pa., reiterated his debate themes: He is independent of President Bush, he said, and Obama is a big-spending liberal who would harm small businesses.
"We can't spend the next four years as we've spent much of the last eight, waiting for our luck to change," McCain said. "As I mentioned last night to Sen. Obama, I'm not George Bush, and if he wanted to run against George Bush, he should have run four years ago."
With the election less than three weeks away, both candidates urged supporters to work tirelessly to get them elected.
McCain's visit to Pennsylvania, where his campaign is struggling, was his second this week. He visited the Philadelphia suburb of Blue Bell on Tuesday to unveil $52.5 billion in proposed tax incentives aimed at easing economic distress.
Obama's poll numbers in Pennsylvania have shot up recently, to a double-digit lead.
"The state of Pennsylvania again will decide who's the next president of the United States," McCain told the crowd. "I need your vote. We've got to carry Pennsylvania; we will carry Pennsylvania."
