BARACK OBAMA and John McCain have sharpened their closing arguments as the US presidential campaign enters its final week with polls predicting an easy victory for the Democrat.
Both candidates were campaigning yesterday in Ohio, which tilted the 2004 election to US president George W Bush and where both sides acknowledge the contest is tight.
The election is now being fought almost exclusively in states Mr Bush won last time, with Pennsylvania the only big state John Kerry won that Mr McCain believes he has a chance of winning.
Speaking in the southern Ohio town of Canton yesterday, Mr Obama promised to move beyond "the old ideological debates and divides between left and right" and to usher in a new politics to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
"We don't need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government - a more competent government - a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans," he said.
"As I've said from the day we began this journey all those months ago, the change we need isn't just about new programmes and policies. It's about a new politics - a politics that calls on our better angels instead of encouraging our worst instincts, one that reminds us of the obligations we have to ourselves and one another."
Returning to the theme of unity in diversity that he struck in the speech to the 2004 Democratic convention that made him a political star, Mr Obama said Americans must take more responsibility for themselves and for others if the country is to meet its challenges.
"That's what's been lost these last eight years - our sense of common purpose, of higher purpose. And that's what we need to restore right now," he said.
"We can argue and debate our positions passionately, but at this defining moment, all of us must summon the strength and grace to bridge our differences and unite in common effort - black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American; Democrat and Republican, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight, disabled or not."
Despite polls showing the Democrat ahead nationally and in the battleground states, Mr Obama warned supporters that they could not afford to be complacent.
"Don't believe for a second this election is over," he said.
"Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our future depends on it in this last week, because it does."
Speaking in Cleveland earlier yesterday after a meeting with his economic advisors, Mr McCain described the election as a choice between two starkly different approaches to economic policy.
"We both disagree with president Bush on economic policies," Mr McCain said of his opponent.
"My approach is to get spending under control. The difference between us is he thinks taxes have been too low, and I think that spending has been too high."
The Republican candidate warned that Mr Obama would destroy jobs by imposing heavier taxes on business instead of encouraging investment and job creation by cutting corporate tax rates.
"My plan will create millions of jobs in America, and Americans are beginning to figure that out," Mr McCain said.
"I will protect your savings and stock market account and get the stock market rising again. The difference between myself and senator Obama is my plan will create jobs, it's a difference of millions of jobs in America."
Republicans yesterday seized on a newly-discovered recording of a 2001 radio interview during which Mr Obama lamented that the civil rights movement of the 1960s failed to address issues surrounding redistribution of wealth.
"I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it, I would be okay. But the supreme court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society," said Mr Obama, who was an Illinois state senator at the time.
He continued: "And one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organising and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that."
Mr Obama's campaign suggested that the Democrat was actually praising the supreme court for refusing to take redistributive action.
But Mr McCain's policy advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said the recording showed that Mr Obama was intent on introducing European-style socialism to the US.
"No wonder he wants to appoint judges that legislate from the bench - as insurance in case a unified Democratic government under his control fails to meet his basic goal - taking money away from people who work for it and giving it to people who Barack Obama believes deserve it," Mr Holtz-Eakin said.
Memories of an outstanding and talented classmate - his name? Barack Obama: Opinion, page 11