Barack Obama and John McCain headed into the final weekend of the presidential campaign today with Mr Obama calling for change and his rival seeking to secure the state of Ohio.
Mr Obama called for a “new politics for a new time” as he suggested his campaign was taking the moral high road to the White House today.
The Democratic candidate, who leads Republican rival John McCain in national polls, said the United States was four days away from change and at a defining moment in its history.
Mr McCain spent today travelling across Ohio by bus, telling voters he feels their economic pain and hoping to lay claim to its 20 electoral votes. Aides say the campaign believes he probably has to win Ohio to be elected, and they did not rule out returning to the state before voting begins on Tuesday.
Mr McCain was campaigning in Hanoverton, and then in Columbus with Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Elsewhere, speaking at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, where he won the first-in-the-nation Democratic caucuses in January, Mr Obama predicted “more of the slash and burn, say anything, do anything politics” from the Republicans over the next four days.
The 47-year-old Illinois senator said taking the moral high road did not lead Mr McCain to the White House when he ran against Mr Bush in the 2000 election so “this time he decided to take a different route”.
“Make no mistake, we will respond swiftly and forcefully, with the truth, to whatever falsehoods they throw our way in these last four days,” he said. “The stakes are too high to do anything less.”
But he said voters had a chance in this election to do more than “beat back” against this kind of politics.
“We have a chance to end it once and for all,” he said. “Four days. After decades of broken politics in Washington, eight years of failed policies from George Bush, 21 months of a campaign that’s taken us from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunshine of California, we are four days away from bringing change to America.
“On the day of the Iowa caucus my faith in the American people was vindicated and what you started here in Iowa has swept the nation. A whole new way of doing democracy started here in Iowa and it’s all over the country now,” Mr Obama said.
In a bold move, Mr Obama also broadened his advertising campaign into two once reliably Republican states — and even placed a commercial in Mr McCain’s home state of Arizona.
The Obama campaign launched new advertising campaigns in Georgia and North Dakota, and campaign manager David Plouffe said the campaign would also begin airing ads in Arizona, which Mr McCain has represented in the US Congress for 26 years.
One of the adverts ties Mr McCain to Mr Bush, showing a man adjusting a rear view mirror in a car as an announcer says: “Wonder where John McCain would take the economy? Look behind you, John McCain wants to continue George Bush’s economic policies.”
Another relies on Mr Obama’s message of “unity over division” and reminds viewers that the Democrat has been endorsed by billionaire investor Warren Buffett and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The McCain campaign also launched their own advert in key states that highlighted how Mr Obama has praised the Republican for his stance on issues such as climate change and torture in the past.
Earlier, speaking at a rally in Hanoverton, Ohio - a must-win state for the Republican - Mr McCain said his rival “began his campaign in the liberal left lane of politics and has never left it”.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has frequently campaigned for Mr McCain after dropping out of the presidential race earlier this year, said: “John McCain was right about the single most important decision that had to be made in the last four years and that was to stick it out in Iraq.”
PA