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Wilmington, Toledo: In a career littered with comebacks, Republican John McCain is now vowing one more Herculean effort to overhaul Barack Obama's commanding poll lead and restore his White House dream.
While the Democratic hopeful for the November 4 election was rolling out a costly new plan on Monday to kickstart the US economy, McCain went back to basics in extolling his own record of heroism and service to a crisis-torn nation.
"I have been written off on so many occasions by political pundits that it's hard for me to count," he told CNN after delivering a retooled stump speech that portrayed Obama as dangerously inexperienced for the challenges at hand.
"I think it is more lives than a cat. But the point is, we are doing fine. I'm happy with where we are. We are fighting the good fight. That's what it is all about. That's what I love," McCain said.
Ahead of today's third and final presidential debate, the latest clutch of polls suggested McCain's all-out offensive on Obama's character has flopped with the Democrat now sitting on a double-digit lead overall.
The latest iteration of McCain's campaign address, delivered in the suddenly at-risk Republican strongholds of North Carolina and Virginia, dropped some of the more inflammatory attacks on Obama of recent days.
Instead, he said, Obama was being presumptuous in already "measuring the drapes" for the White House. "But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we've got them just where we want them," McCain insisted, having already come back once after his campaign for the Republican nomination looked dead and buried in mid-2007.
Obama proposals
Meanwhile, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama on Monday proposed tax credits and other steps to create jobs and to cushion Americans against the economic downturn but analysts described his ideas as modest.
The steps would cost $60 billion over two years and include penalty-free withdrawals from retirement accounts, temporarily barring banks from foreclosing on people trying to pay their mortgages and greater lending to states and municipalities.
The Illinois senator outlined his plan in Ohio, a battleground state that has suffered from the US economic downturn and is central to his campaign against McCain.
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