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At a rally in Asheville, NC today, Barack Obama will hammer John McCain for trying to turn the page on the economic crisis by distracting voters with Swiftboat style attacks against him.

Obama will say, “And on Friday, we learned that we’d lost another 159,000 American jobs in September. It was the ninth straight month of job losses – more than three quarters of a million this year, including 24,000 here in North Carolina. And it came just as we finished a week in which our financial markets teetered on the brink of disaster. Yet instead of addressing these crises, Senator McCain’s campaign has announced that they plan to turn the page on the discussion about our economy and spend the final weeks of this campaign launching Swiftboat-style attacks on me.”

Obama hits McCain hard on his turn the page comment, “Think about that for a second. Turn the page on the economy? We’re facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and John McCain wants us to “turn the page?” Well, I know the policies he’s supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend. I can understand why Senator McCain would want to “turn the page” and ignore this economy.”

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Obama says that McCain and his operatives would rather distract the country with smears, than talk about substance, “Senator McCain and his operatives are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. They’d rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up. It’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time.

He continues, “I want you to know that I’m going to keep on talking about the issues that matter – about the economy and health care and education and energy. I’m going to keep on standing up for hard working families. We’re not going to let John McCain distract us from what we need to do to move this country forward.”

Obama is correct, and he is also getting more bold. Like any great politician, he smells blood in the water, and he is going in for the kill. He is going to keep pummeling McCain on the economy every day until November 4. McCain is not going to win this election with personal attacks. It is like he and his advisors don’t understand that 2008 is not a Republican year. They are not going to win this election by running same campaign that worked in 2000 and 2004.

Republicans don’t have a legacy of scandal to run against as they did in 2000, and they don’t have the most important issues on their side as they did in 2004. The McCain camp doesn’t get it. This election is being contested on the economy. If they want to win this election, they have to come up with an alternative economic plan that goes beyond generic conservative platitudes about tax cuts, spending, and entitlements.

People want to know what the candidates are going to do about jobs, prices, home foreclosures, and the financial crisis. These are questions that can’t be answered by promising a tax cut. George W. Bush already did that. So far, only Obama is talking about the issues that matter most to voters. Running a character campaign, when voters want to hear about the issues is a path to certain defeat, and this the road that John McCain is speeding down, oblivious to the warning signs all around him.

Excerpts from Obama in NC