Presidential rivals prepare for debate

The two US presidential rivals go head-to-head in their second debate tonight after the race to the White House took a nasty turn.

John McCain accused his rival Barack Obama of lying while the Republican’s running mate Sarah Palin claimed the Democrat was “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country”.

And Mr Obama hit back, accusing the McCain campaign of using “smear tactics” to distract voters after the financial crisis engulfing the country sent Mr McCain’s poll numbers plummeting.

With just four weeks to go until the election, Mr Obama leads in virtually all the battleground states and has more than a five-point lead nationally in the latest average of polls by RealClearPolitics.com.

Mr McCain now needs a game-changing performance in the debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, if he is to get his campaign back on track.

The second debate – the first in Mississippi 11 days ago resulted in a virtual tie – will adopt a so-called town hall format with the moderator posing questions drawn from audience members and emails.

It is a format preferred by the McCain campaign who also invited Mr Obama to join him in 10 such debates across the country. The 47-year-old Illinois senator declined.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mr McCain delivered an unusually scathing attack on his rival.

He accused Mr Obama of lying about Mr McCain’s efforts to regulate the home loan industry and suggested Mr Obama was a mysterious figure who cannot be trusted.

“Who is the real Barack Obama?” Mr McCain said to a cheering crowd. “Ask such questions and all you get in response is another barrage of angry insults.”

But Mr Obama, taking a break from debate preparations in Asheville, North Carolina, accused his rival’s campaign of using “smear tactics” to distract voters and said Mr McCain was not paying enough attention to the economic crisis gripping the country.

Mr Obama said he could not “imagine anything more important to talk about” than Americans’ losing their jobs, healthcare and homes.

Yesterday, Mr Obama suggested he had learned lessons from Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, Democrats who lost presidential elections after hesitating to counter hard-hitting and factually dubious attacks on their character and judgment.

“We don’t throw the first punch, but we’ll throw the last,” Mr Obama told Tom Joyner’s US radio show.

After the McCain campaign sought to link him to terrorists at the weekend, Mr Obama released a television advert that said Mr McCain was “erratic in a crisis” and “out of touch on the economy”.

His campaign played upon the 72-year-old Arizona senator’s stumbling response to the US financial crisis and shifting positions as Congress and the White House worked out a $700bn rescue plan.

The Democrats also brought up Mr McCain’s connections to Charles Keating, a convicted savings and loan owner whose actions two decades ago triggered a Senate ethics investigation that involved Mr McCain as one of the “Keating Five”.

Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor said Mr McCain’s involvement with Keating was “a window into McCain’s economic past, present and future”.

A short video, emailed to millions of Mr Obama’s supporters, summarised a 13-minute “documentary” on the Obama campaign website.

Five senators helped Keating in his bid to keep federal regulators from taking action against him for questionable business practices.

The Senate ethics committee found Mr McCain broke no laws, but he acknowledged bad judgment in attending two meetings with regulators and Senate colleagues on Keating’s behalf and has called it “the worst mistake of my life”.

In a McCain campaign conference call, John Dowd, who represented Mr McCain before the Senate Ethics Committee, said: “The bottom line was that John had not violated any rule of the Senate or any law of the United States.”

The accusations came after Mrs Palin claimed Mr Obama was friends with a terrorist and represented the wrong type of change for America.

At the weekend, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska said repeatedly that Mr Obama saw America as so imperfect “that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country”.

The accusations related to the 47-year-old Illinois senator’s association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground whose members were blamed for several bombings when Mr Obama was a child.

Mr Obama has denounced Ayers’ radical views and activities and there is no evidence they “pal around”.

But speaking about Mr Obama at a rally in Clearwater in the battleground state of Florida yesterday, Mrs Palin said: “I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.

“This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change that anyone can believe in: not my kids, not for your kids.”

She went on: “I’m just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America: as the greatest source for good in this world.”

Both Ayers and Mr Obama served on the board of the same Chicago charity and live near each other in Chicago. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Mr Obama when the Democrat first ran for office in the mid-1990s, the event cited by Mrs Palin.

The attacks come after McCain adviser Greg Strimple predicted “a very aggressive last 30 days” of the campaign in a recent conference call with reporters.

“We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr Obama’s aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans,” he said.