John McCain warned voters Monday that his rival Barack Obama was a shifty, job-killing socialist who wasn’t ready to take on the challenges facing the next US president.
Trailing in the polls with just two weeks left before the November 4 election, McCain kept up his attack on Obama’s economic policies, while vowing to fight to take the country in a new direction.
The fate of small business owners was central to McCain’s attack, as the Arizona senator capitalized on a recent encounter Obama had with an Ohio plumber, the now-famous Joe Wurzelbacher, who was worried he would not be able to realize his dream of owning his own business if Obama raised taxes.
"After months of campaign trail eloquence we finally learned what Senator Obama’s economic goal is. As he told Joe, he wants to ‘spread the wealth around," McCain told a boisterous crowd gathered on a high school football field in Belton, Missouri.
"If I’m elected president, I won’t raise taxes on anyone, especially small businesses. Senator Obama will and that will force them to cut jobs."
McCain surrounded himself with small business owners at a barbecue restaurant in Columbia, Missouri whom he called "the backbone of America’s economy."
"They don’t want their taxes increased," McCain told reporters. "They don’t want checks given away to people that don’t pay taxes because Senator Obama wants to take the money from somebody and give it to somebody else."
The tactic does not appear to be doing much to help rouse support for McCain, who was down 11 points in Gallup’s national tracking poll Monday.
A poll by Suffolk University found that, while most voters in Ohio and Missouri have now heard of "Joe the Plumber," few said their vote was influenced by his story.
Only six percent of respondents in Ohio and eight percent of those in Missouri said they were more likely to vote for McCain out of concern that Obama would be increasing taxes on small businesses earning more than 250,000 dollars a year.
Some four percent in Ohio and three percent in Missouri said the story made them more likely to vote for Obama, according to the survey released Monday which also found that Obama was leading by nine points in the key battleground of Ohio and McCain was ahead by one point in Missouri.
McCain’s swing through the midwestern state of Missouri comes two days after Obama attracted a monstrous crowd of 100,000 people at a Saturday night rally St. Louis.