The Republican National Committee released what it called an "Obama Spend-O-Meter," designed to calculate the cost of the programs he has proposed. "Barack Obama may package his economic plans with poetic rhetoric, but it's fundamentally still the same old tax-and-spend liberal dogma," said Alex Conant, a committee spokesman.
Clinton's campaign noted that she had already supported similar measures. In McAllen, Texas, Clinton faulted Obama's economic agenda, saying that it "fails to provide universal health care, fails to address the housing crisis, and fails to immediately start creating good-paying jobs."
Obama, who has won 21 states in the Democratic presidential nominating fight, is working to add Wisconsin to his string of victories by tapping into an anti-war sentiment before that state's primary on Tuesday. As he pointed out his opposition to the war, he linked his criticism of Clinton with John McCain as he noted Washington's failures.
"It's a Washington where politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton voted for a war in Iraq that should've never been authorized and never been waged," Obama said. "A war that is costing us thousands of precious lives and billions of dollars a week."
That seemed to be a debate that McCain was eager to participate in. After receiving the endorsements of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, he brought up the war too, and criticized the Democrats for their views.
"They said that we would never succeed militarily, then we began to succeed militarily," McCain said. "Granted, we still have a long way to go in Iraq. And then they said they can't succeed politically."
In aiming criticism at Obama, McCain seemed to ignore his last Republican rival, Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who continues to give the McCain campaign headaches by doing well in nominating contests even though, as McCain's campaign noted Wednesday, there are not enough delegates left for Huckabee to win the nomination. (It calculated that he would need to win 123 percent of remaining delegates.)
