Senator Barack Obama on Monday expanded his economic platform, including proposals to spur new jobs, to give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings to help them through the downturn, to urge a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and to lend money to strapped local and state governments.
“We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet,” Mr. Obama said in an afternoon speech here at the Sea Gate Convention Centre before a crowd of more than 3,000 people.
Mr. Obama called on Congress to double by another $25 billion the government loan guarantees for automakers and to temporarily eliminate taxes on unemployment benefits.
Campaign advisers said those steps and several others could be taken before January through current laws or by the Democratic-controlled Congress acting in a lame-duck session.
Mr. Obama outlined his revised plan in Toledo, a struggling city that is representative of the economic crisis and the battle for industrial-belt swing states that could determine the winner of the Nov. 4 election. He is spending three days in northwestern Ohio, sequestered with an advisers to prepare for the third presidential debate on Wednesday.
In a 30-minute address here, Mr. Obama also called on Americans to embrace a new “ethic of responsibility.” His speech was supplemented with visions of optimism, but conceded that tough times faced the nation in the coming months and years.
“I won’t pretend this will be easy,” Mr. Obama said. “George Bush has dug a deep hole for us. It’s going to take a while for us to dig our way out. We’re going to have to set priorities as never before.”
Senator John McCain, his Republican rival, also gave an economic speech in Virginia Beach, Va., with no new policy prescriptions, having rejected his advisers’ options over the weekend as too gimmicky, according to one Republican close to the campaign. He offered a glum sense of the nation’s economic outlook, bracing people for the challenges ahead.
“These are hard times, my friends,” Mr. McCain said. “Our economy is in crisis. Financial markets are collapsing. Credit is drying up. Your savings are in danger and your retirement is at risk. Jobs are disappearing.”
While the Obama campaign billed the speech here as a major economic address, about three-fourths of the proposals had already been announced. But the handful of new plans were intended to highlight how he would immediately help middle-class Americans — if not his own political standing by reassuring voters he is on top of the crisis.
“At a time when the ups and downs of the stock market have rarely been so unpredictable and dramatic,” Mr. Obama said, “we also need to give families and retirees more flexibility and security when it comes to their retirement savings.”
Mr. Obama reprimanded his audience when people started jeering at the mention of Mr. McCain’s name, declaring: “We don’t need that. We just need to vote.”
Mr. Obama praised Mr. McCain’s proposal to waive the rules that penalize retiree withdrawals from 401(k)’s, saying: “I want to give credit where credit is due.”
Before Mr. Obama spoke here, aides announced the highlights of his speech. They did so after word had spread on Sunday evening that Mr. McCain would not be presenting new economic proposals, as had been suggested by some aides.
The Obama campaign was attempting to maintain its hold on the economic message that has lifted the Democratic candidate in recent weeks.
“We have the advantage of sharing ideas that are consistent with the ideas we have shared before,” David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist, said in an interview. New polls suggest mounting economic anxieties among voters are fueling Mr. Obama’s growing lead in many polls against Mr. McCain.
The main new proposals would:
— for the next two years, give businesses a $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee they hire above the number in their current workforce;
— allow savers with tax-favored Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k)’s to withdraw 15 percent of those retirement savings, up to a maximum of $10,000, without paying a tax penalty as the law currently requires for withdrawals before age 59 and a half;
— bar financial institutions that take advantage of the Treasury’s rescue plan from foreclosing on the mortgages of any homeowners who are making “good-faith efforts” to make payments;
— direct the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to create a temporary facility for loans to state and local governments, similar to the Fed’s new arrangement to loan corporations money by buying their commercial paper, which are the I.O.U.s that help businesses with daily operating expenses like payrolls.
Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, criticized the Obama plan as one that would raise taxes on Americans, which he said would have “a devastating effect.”
“Interestingly, Barack Obama called a moratorium on foreclosures, which is a policy he had previously labeled disastrous when it was proposed by a political opponent,” Mr. Bounds said, referring to a plan proposed by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Proving yet again that Barack Obama’s positions on the issues are tied to elections, not solutions for the American people.”
During his remarks here, Mr. Obama gently scolded all Americans for “living beyond their means — from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street.” His audience of supporters applauded as he said it was a moment in the nation’s history to pull together and sacrifice.
“We’ve lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to take out as many credit cards as possible, to take out as many credit cards as possible, to borrow instead of save,” Mr. Obama said. “Now, I know that in an age of declining wages and skyrocketing costs, for many folks this was not a choice but a necessity just to keep up, I understand that.”
“But we now know how dangerous that can be,” he continued. “Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires that we do what’s necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and encourage personal savings again.”
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