WASHINGTON -- As Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton accused Sen. Barack Obama of using rhetoric that lacks specifics or fails to yield results, Obama countered yesterday by offering a detailed plan to spend $210 billion to create jobs in construction and environmentally friendly fields.
Obama's sweep of Tuesday's primaries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, which pushed him into the lead in the count for Democratic delegates, left him very much the target of his main Democratic and Republican rivals.
Clinton, of New York, basking in cheers from enthusiastic crowds during a campaign swing through Texas, whose March 4 primary has become increasingly vital to her candidacy, contrasted what she called her "solutions" for voters' financial struggles with what she termed the "rhetoric" of Obama, her rival for the Democratic nomination. And at a news conference here in Washington, McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, said that Obama's speeches have been "singularly lacking in specifics."
Obama, of Illinois, meanwhile, opened his campaign for next week's Wisconsin primary by presenting his plan to spur the creation of construction and environmentally friendly jobs. He made his speech inside a General Motors Corp. plant in Janesville, Wis., one day after GM posted a $38.7 billion loss for 2007, the largest ever for a U.S. auto company.
And Obama seemed to allude to the criticism of his rivals by saying at the outset of his remarks that he was going to "take it down a notch" by giving a speech that he said would be "a little more detailed, a little longer, with not as many applause lines."
He went on to call for a decade-long investment in a $150 billion plan to create 5 million "green-collar" jobs to develop energy sources that are friendly to the environment. He also called for a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, a $60 billion program, which he said would create 2 million jobs for rebuilding highways, bridges and airports.
"I've paid for every element of this economic agenda," said Obama, who said the money would come from costs associated with the Iraq war and eliminating tax breaks for corporations.
He said the nation's economic woes stemmed from failures of government.
"We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control," Obama said. "The fallout from the housing crisis that's cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle; it was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington."
The Republican National Committee released what it called an "Obama Spend-O-Meter," designed to calculate the cost of the programs he has proposed. "Barack Obama may package his economic plans with poetic rhetoric, but it's fundamentally still the same old tax-and-spend liberal dogma," said Alex Conant, a committee spokesman.
Clinton's campaign noted that she had already supported similar measures. In McAllen, Texas, Clinton faulted Obama's economic agenda, saying that it "fails to provide universal health care, fails to address the housing crisis, and fails to immediately start creating good-paying jobs."
Obama, who has won 21 states in the Democratic presidential nominating fight, is working to add Wisconsin to his string of victories by tapping into an anti-war sentiment before that state's primary on Tuesday. As he pointed out his opposition to the war, he linked his criticism of Clinton with John McCain as he noted Washington's failures.
"It's a Washington where politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton voted for a war in Iraq that should've never been authorized and never been waged," Obama said. "A war that is costing us thousands of precious lives and billions of dollars a week."
That seemed to be a debate that McCain was eager to participate in. After receiving the endorsements of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, he brought up the war too, and criticized the Democrats for their views.
"They said that we would never succeed militarily, then we began to succeed militarily," McCain said. "Granted, we still have a long way to go in Iraq. And then they said they can't succeed politically."
In aiming criticism at Obama, McCain seemed to ignore his last Republican rival, Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who continues to give the McCain campaign headaches by doing well in nominating contests even though, as McCain's campaign noted Wednesday, there are not enough delegates left for Huckabee to win the nomination. (It calculated that he would need to win 123 percent of remaining delegates.)