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WAUKESHA, Wisconsin: John McCain and Sarah Palin cranked up a searing character assault on Barack Obama on Thursday, but another day of punishing losses on Wall Street further dented their White House hopes.
The Republican nominee and his vice presidential running mate railed against Obama's personal honesty, but the deepening financial crisis played into the Democratic nominee's hands as he slammed Republican economic policies.
Trailing badly in the polls just over three weeks before the November 4 election, McCain and Palin accused Obama of not telling the truth about the extent of his relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers.
"Look, we don't care about an old washed-up terrorist... the point is senator Obama said he was just a guy in the neighbourhood," McCain said in a town-hall meeting in the swing state of Wisconsin.
"We know that's not true. We need to know the full extent of the relationship because of whether senator Obama is telling the truth to the American people or not."
Palin also raised Ayers on conservative pundit Laura Ingraham's radio talk show, saying Obama had not told the "total truth" about an "unrepentant domestic terrorist" as the campaign debuted a hard-hitting negative advertisement on the issue.
The Obama camp said the ad was a "desperate and dishonest" attempt to distract voters from the worsening economic crisis and the McCain campaign's darkening prospects in the run-up to voting day.
The Democratic nominee, 47, has repeatedly said he is not close to Ayers, 63, an assertion backed by independent fact-checking organizations, but said he served on philanthropic boards with him and lives in the same Chicago neighbourhood.
Ayers was a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a radical faction that carried out bomb attacks in the United States at the height of the anti-war movement in the 1960s. Today he is an education theorist and professor at the University of Illinois.
Obama meanwhile fired up large crowds on a two-day bus tour of Ohio, warning that Americans could not afford four more years of Republican economic policies, on a day the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped nearly 600 points.
He accused McCain, 72, of showing "erratic" leadership in uncertain times.
"We need steady leadership in the White House. We need a president we can trust in times of crisis."
Obama also ridiculed McCain's plan to buy up US$300 billion in bad mortgages as a waste of taxpayer money, as his campaign hit back against the personal attacks.
"It's now clear that John McCain would rather launch angry, personal attacks than talk about the economy or defend his risky bailout scheme," said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor.
McCain trails Obama by widening margins in battleground state polls, in national surveys and even on some reliable Republican turf, and time is fast running out for him to turn the race around.
For the second straight day Thursday, Obama led McCain by 11 points in the Gallup Daily Tracking poll, and two new polls by USA Today and Rasmussen found he was the clear winner of Tuesday night's presidential debate.
McCain's relentlessly negative attacks comes after a Republican aide was quoted as saying in a newspaper article the campaign wanted to turn the spotlight away from devastating economic news.
The character attacks may be an attempt to leverage cultural suspicion among white working class voters in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the economic crisis has hammered McCain's hopes.
On Wednesday, McCain's wife Cindy took up the assault, accusing Obama of voting against legislation funding troops in Iraq while her son was serving in the war zone.
"The day senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son, when he was serving, sent a cold chill through my body," she said.
Democrats including Obama voted against the troop funding bill on the grounds that it did not include withdrawal timelines. At the time, there was little realistic prospect that funding for the war would be halted.
Also on Wednesday, an warm-up speaker for McCain and Palin spoke about "Barack Hussein Obama." Democrats accuse Republicans of mentioning their nominee's middle name to fan inaccurate suspicions that Obama, who is a Christian, is a Muslim.
The McCain campaign said in a statement it did not condone such comments, but it was the latest in a sequence of occasions when Obama's middle name has come up at Republican events .
McCain himself was accused of being disrespectful towards Obama in Tuesday's debate, referring to him dismissively as "that one."
- AFP/yb
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