| | Obama camp: McCain 'desperate and dishonest'
 MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AFP) - John McCain cranked up a searing character assault on Democrat Barack Obama Thursday, branding him "too risky" for the White House, as he raced to rescue his diving poll numbers.
McCain issued a hard-hitting negative commercial, slamming his rival's judgement and candor and accusing him of not telling the truth about the extent of his acquaintance with 1960s radical William Ayers.
The Obama camp said the ad was "desperate and dishonest" and an attempt to distract voters from the worsening economic crisis and the McCain campaign's darkening prospects in the November 4 election.
Obama, set to launch a two-day bus tour in Ohio, often a decisive swing-state, also hit back with an ad ridiculing McCain's plan to buy up 300 billion dollars in bad mortgages as a waste of taxpayer money.
McCain trails Obama by widening margins in battleground state polls, in national surveys and even on some reliable Republican turf, and time is fast running out for him to turn the race around.
His latest ad noted that Ayers was part of the activist Weather Underground group and his wife was on the FBI's Most Wanted list, and says Obama has disguised the full scope of their relationship.
"Americans say, 'where's the truth, Barack?' the ad says. "Barack Obama. Too risky for America."
Obama has repeatedly said he is not close to Ayers, an assertion backed up by independent fact checking organizations, but said he served on philanthropic boards with him and lives in the same Chicago neighborhood.
Senior Obama strategist Robert Gibbs Thursday blasted McCain's new ad as a "desperate and dishonest political attack."
"It's meant to cover up that John McCain has virtually no answers for the economic crisis," he said on ABC.
But McCain spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace said the ad asked a deeper question about Obama's character.
"If we can't tell Barack Obama to tell the truth about the guys in his neighborhood, who also happen to be domestic terrorists ... how can we trust him to tell the truth about what he could do as president?"
McCain's relentlessly negative comes after the Republican camp said it wanted to turn the spotlight away from devastating economic news.
The character attacks may be an attempt to leverage cultural suspicion among white working class voters in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the economic crisis has hammered McCain's hopes.
Recent McCain tactics have seen anti-Obama bile pouring out of McCain crowds, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin accusing the Democrat of "palling around" with terrorists and a personal attack by McCain's wife Cindy.
The McCain character assault against Obama has escalated sharply in recent days, though the Arizona senator did not raise Ayers, who is now a college professor, in the second presidential debate on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, McCain's wife Cindy took up the assault, accusing Obama of voting against legislation funding troops in Iraq while her son was serving in the war zone.
"The day Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son, when he was serving -- -- sent a cold chill through my body," she said.
Democrats including Obama voted against the troop funding bill on the grounds that it did not include withdrawal timelines. At the time, there was little realistic prospect that funding for the war would be halted.
Also on Wednesday, an warm-up speaker for McCain and Palin spoke about "Barack Hussein Obama." Democrats accuse Republicans of mentioning their nominee's middle name to fan inaccurate suspicions that Obama, who is a Christian, is a Muslim.
The McCain campaign said in a statement it did not condone such comments, but it was the latest in a sequence of occasions when Obama's middle name has come up at Republican events .
McCain himself was accused of being disrespectful towards Obama in Tuesday's debate, referring to him dismissively as "that one."
And the Republican nominee has been stepping up criticism of the Democrat on the stump.
"Who is the real Barack Obama?" he asked on Wednesday, after saying in a Fox News interview that his rival was not prepared to be president.
Meanwhile, there have been angry chants of "treason" and hisses and boos, when Obama's name is mentioned at McCain rallies.
McCain was campaigning Thursday in the midwestern state of Wisconisin, which was once a battleground but where polls suggest Obama may be set for victory, just over three weeks from election day.
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