McCain and Obama start new vote countdown

US: Barack Obama and John McCain on Monday started the first full week of their head-to-head battle for the November presidential election, both intent on redrafting the US political landscape.

After Hillary Clinton's exit from the primary race and fulsome endorsement of Obama Saturday, supporters of the Democrat and his Republican rival hammered two of the defining themes for the presidential election: the economy and Iraq.

"The fact is that John McCain voted 95 percent of the time with (President) George Bush last year, and 90 percent of the time with George Bush over the entire presidency," said John Kerry, the Democrats' defeated nominee in 2004.

"That's not a change. That's not reform. That's not a difference," the Massachusetts senator told ABC News.

McCain backers cast Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal whose first instinct was to thrust big government into every corner of US society. His inspirational oratory had no substantive underpinnings, they said.

"When it comes to Senator Obama, it's all talk," South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said. "(He) never did anything the left didn't want to hear, whether Iraq policy or anything else, and John has been his own man for a long time," he said, touting the Arizona senator's maverick appeal to independent voters.

But Obama, 46, is not ceding the centrist electorate that could well decide who succeeds Bush, who officially stands down in January.

The Illinois senator's itinerary takes him far from Democratic strongholds, giving an insight into his strategy to become the nation's first black president.

On Monday Obama launches a two-week, nationwide economic tour starting in North Carolina, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential hopeful since 1976. The tour takes Obama Tuesday to Missouri, which has not chosen a Democrat since voting for Bill Clinton in 1996, having already visited Virginia last week (previous Democratic victory: 1964).

Both candidates rolled out biographical television spots to re-introduce themselves to voters after the gruelling primary season.

Obama's story is of a mixed-race trailblazer who, he says, personifies hope and the American dream. McCain, 71, is the grizzled veteran and war hero who survived five years of torture during captivity in Vietnam.

Opinion polls indicate that more than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction a signal of a problem for the party in power. "The atmospherics for the Republicans haven't been this bad since 1974," said former McCain adviser John Weaver.

Clinton was not entirely out of the picture yet, with surrogates for the former first lady flagging up her 18 million primary votes to press her qualification to be vice president in an Obama administration.

"I've looked at every other possible candidate. No one brings to a ticket what Hillary brings," said California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who hosted a fence-mending meeting between the two Democrats on Thursday.

Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson reaffirmed that the New York senator was not agitating for the vice presidency under Obama. Washington, Monday, AFP