Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama attacked rival Hillary Clinton over the US economy yesterday and targeted Republican front-runner John McCain.
A day after sweeping three more Democratic presidential contests, the Illinois senator unveiled an initiative to produce five million jobs in the green-energy sector and promised to create a development bank that would invest $60 billion to rebuild the country's infrastructure.
"We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control," Mr Obama said in Wisconsin, which holds the next Democratic nominating contest on Tuesday.
"It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington - the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy."
He accused Mrs Clinton of changing her stance on the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, saying she supported it when it was signed but now says "we need a time-out on trade".
Mr Obama also said Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain had wasted billions of dollars and cost thousands of lives by supporting an unnecessary war in Iraq as US senators.
Clinton aides said Mr Obama's ideas for an infrastructure development bank and five million green energy sector jobs were taken from her own campaign proposals.
While Mr Obama campaigned in Wisconsin, Mrs Clinton focused on contests in the heavily populated states of Ohio and Texas in three weeks as her best hope to stop her rival's surge.
Mr McCain said developments in Iraq showed Democrats had been premature in demanding a withdrawal of US forces.