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Obama focuses on jobs to woo Florida vote

With the economic meltdown creating problems for Republicans, Democratic Senator Barack Obama is focusing his final-stretch message of the presidential campaign on a rescue plan for the battered middle-class household.

Obama was to hold a jobs summit yesterday in Florida with the Democratic governors of four battleground states as well as business leaders and economic experts.

The meeting comes a day after Obama launched a major push with the help of former rival Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and other surrogates to win Florida, a key state that could propel him to victory over Republican Senator John McCain.

Amid concern that battleground states were slipping from their grasp, McCain aides scheduled a daylong tour yesterday across Pennsylvania — one of the only Democratic-leaning states where the Republican ticket is still aggressively campaigning in hopes of scratching out a comeback victory.

Obama planned to hammer home the message that he has the best economic plan during yesterday’s roundtable. The event, amounting to a mass public endorsement of his economic proposals, was drawing the governors of Michigan, Ohio, New Mexico and Colorado to the town of Lake Worth in Florida.

All the states except Michigan, which McCain recently abandoned, voted for President George W. Bush in 2004. But polls show Obama leading in all four states, which now have Democratic governors.

In Colorado and Ohio, McCain is believed to be down, but within or close to the margin of error in polls. Florida, once solidly in McCain’s corner, now is a tossup. And in New Mexico, Obama appears to have a comfortable lead.

Obama had planned several other appearances in Florida yesterday, capped by an evening rally with his wife, Michelle, in Miami.

Obama also campaigned across the state on Monday, holding a solo rally in Tampa and a joint event with Clinton in Orlando that was attended by more than 50,000 people. He heads to more Republican-leaning states, Virginia and Indiana, today and tomorrow.

After a morning rally tomorrow in Indianapolis, Obama will fly to Hawaii to visit his suddenly gravely ill, 85-year-old grandmother, a central figure in her grandson’s life. She helped raise him.

“She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me,” Obama said in his August speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination.

He is to resume campaigning on Saturday in an undetermined location in the West, mostly likely another state that went for Bush in 2004, such as Nevada, aides said.

On Monday, McCain focused on Missouri, speaking to a crowd of 2,000 in a suburb north of St. Louis, where he and supporters branded Obama a liberal and criticized feminists and the media as they rallied their conservative base.

“We don’t want a president who invites testing from the world at a time when our economy is in crisis and Americans are already fighting in two wars,” McCain, 72, told supporters.
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