Democratic White House nominee Barack Obama on Monday accused his Republican foe John McCain of pursuing "small" and "ugly" politics in an eleventh hour bid to rescue his White House hopes.
Obama launched a blitz of crucial swing state Florida, which will see him hold a double-bill rally with former primary foe Hillary Clinton later Monday, by rebuking McCain for his tactics, 15 days before election day.
"In the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over," Obama told thousands of supporters in a rally at the spring training headquarters of baseball's New York Yankees.
"We've seen it before and we're seeing it again -- ugly phone calls, misleading mail, misleading TV ads, careless, outrageous comments," Obama said.
"It's getting so bad that even Senator McCain's running mate denounced his tactics last night. As you know, you really have to work hard to violate Governor Palin's standards on negative campaigning," Obama said.
"But we're not going to be distracted. We're not going to be diverted. Not this time. Not this year. Our challenges are too great for a politics that's so small."
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on Sunday told reporters that if she was in charge, she would meet Americans at their kitchen tables and not rely on "the old conventional ways of campaigning that includes those robocalls," referring to automated telephone calls to voters at their homes.
Obama also urged Floridians to cast their ballots in early voting which opened Monday, hoping to lock in his narrow lead in most opinion polls of the southern state.
He zeroed in on the economy, in a state which had appeared to favor McCain before it was hammered hard by the mortgage crisis and loss of tourism dollars amid the financial meltdown.
"We have tried it John McCain's way. We have tried it George Bush's way. It hasn't worked. It's time for something new," Obama said, saying bailout efforts should prioritize "innocent" homeowners and not big banks and finance firms.
Earlier in swing-state Missouri, McCain accused Obama of plotting to gum up the US economy with higher taxes and of not being straight with voters.
"After months of campaign trail eloquence... we finally learned what Senator Obama's economic goal is: as he told Joe (the plumber), he wants to 'spread the wealth' around," McCain said.
"If I'm elected president I won't raise taxes on small businesses, Senator Obama will and that will force them to cut jobs."
