WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain tried yesterday to relaunch his campaign with a pledge to use broad-based tax cuts to revive the ailing economy - and a string of barbs contrasting his views with Sen. Barack Obama's.
"The choice in this election is stark and simple," McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, told a town hall meeting in Denver. "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't. I will cut them where I can."
Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, countered yesterday by challenging McCain and promising that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year.
"If Senator McCain wants a debate about taxes in this campaign," Obama told supporters in Charlotte, N.C., "that's a debate I'm happy to have." Obama spoke to his backers through a telephone hookup after his Charlotte-bound plane was grounded in St. Louis because of maintenance trouble.
Neither candidate's address yesterday contained new proposals. McCain's chief purpose was not only to shift his campaign's focus squarely to the economy but also to reignite his White House bid after weeks of organizational trouble and muddled messages.
Carly Fiorina, a senior McCain adviser, described the new phase as "a little bit like a start-up company becoming a multimillion-dollar corporation."
But David Carney, a Republican consultant and President George H.W. Bush's White House political director, saw McCain's shift in starker terms: "The biggest problem was they talked about two or three different things every week."
That could be tough to fix for McCain, whose maverick tendencies have fueled his political success. He also faces the problem of running as a Republican in a year when the party's approval ratings are dismal.
McCain tried to put some distance between himself and his party yesterday, criticizing Congress and the Bush administration for having "failed to meet their responsibilities to manage the government."
McCain has been a senator since 1987, however, and Obama charged that "he's launching a new economic tour today with politics that are very much the same as those we have seen from the Bush administration."
Many of McCain's ideas are similar or even identical to President Bush's, notably his support for continuing key elements of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire during the next administration. Asked to list three ways that Bush and McCain differed on the economy, Fiorina struggled and listed only one: better job training for displaced workers.
