Democrat Barack Obama entered the final seven days of the dramatic presidential campaign exhorting supporters to fight to the end to defeat Republican John McCain and remake the nation.
The White House rivals were to hold competing rallies yesterday in the rust-belt state of Pennsylvania before splitting, with Senator McCain fighting a rearguard action in North Carolina and Senator Obama on the attack in Virginia.
Despite holding a robust poll lead nationally and in battleground states, Senator Obama, 47, warned against complacency as he prepared to air a costly 30-minute ''infomercial'' on main US networks.
''Don't believe for a second this election is over,'' the Illinois senator bidding to be America's first black president said on Monday in Pittsburgh, whose withered steelworks are symptomatic of Pennsylvania's industrial blight.
''And Pittsburgh, that's why we cannot afford to slow down, or sit back, or let up for one day, one minute, or one second in this final week,'' he told 15,800 supporters in the cavernous arena of the Penguins ice hockey team.
''In one week, you can choose hope over fear, unity over division, the promise of change over the power of the status quo,'' Senator Obama said, his oratory returning to its early campaign heights as the electrifying race climaxes. ''We can't let up... not when so much is at stake,'' he said in what aides called his ''closing argument'' to voters.
For Senator McCain, Pennsylvania and its swollen ranks of disaffected, white, working-class voters is must-win territory on November4, along with historically Republican bastions such as North Carolina and Virginia.
The Arizona senator, 72, vied to reignite fears of ''socialism'' by citing a 2001 radio interview given by Senator Obama where he appeared to lament the failure of the 1960s civil rights movement to bring about greater financial equality.
''That is what change means for Barack the redistributor: It means taking your money and giving it to someone else,'' he told a crowd of about 2000 at a sports hall in Dayton, Ohio.
In Cleveland earlier, Senator McCain said, ''Today he claims he'll tax the rich; but we've seen in the past that he's been willing to hit people squarely in the middle class.''
Senator Obama's camp responded swiftly, rejecting Senator McCain's comment over wealth redistribution as a ''false, desperate attack,'' as the candidate tarred the Republican with the taint of President George W.Bush's economic policies.
''I can take one more week of John McCain's attacks, but this country can't take four more years of the same old politics and the same failed policies. It's time for something new,'' Senator Obama said in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The challenge facing Senator McCain was underlined by his choice this late in the game to head to North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democratic White House hopeful since 1976, but is now a raging battleground.
Virginia is an even deeper shade of Republican ''red'', having last backed a Democrat for the presidency way back in 1964. But Senator Obama has a double-digit poll lead there, and is hoping the forecasts could signal a landslide in his favour.
The Republican was to address an evening rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of the vast Fort Bragg army base, as the former Vietnam prisoner of war hammers Senator Obama as unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.
''I have fought for you most of my life, and in places where defeat meant more than returning to the Senate,'' Senator McCain said in Dayton.
Senator Obama, vowing to pull US forces out of Iraq and expand the Afghan theatre, has been going toe to toe on national security with Senator McCain, but is driving the economy as the defining issue of this historic election.
A new Gallup tracking poll of likely voters nationwide gave Senator Obama a lead of 50per cent to 45per cent over Senator McCain. Broader polls of registered voters give the Democrat a double-digit margin.
AFP
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