McCain raps Obama on taxes, economy

Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) sought to derail his opponent’s two-week economic tour Tuesday morning by trying to peg Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as a tax-and-spend liberal.

McCain, who had to fight through three separate anti-war protests early in his speech, said the presumptive Democratic nominee would “enact the single largest tax increase since the Second World War.”

{mosads}McCain addressed the National Federation of Independent Business, saying that Obama would hurt small businesses by repealing the Bush tax cuts, renegotiating foreign trade agreements, raising and indexing the minimum wage and eliminating secret ballots for union membership.

The Arizona senator came out on the second day of Obama’s “Change That Works for You” economic tour, blasting Obama’s policies on the issue while talking up the tentative plan for the two candidates to engage in joint town hall appearances.

“Our disagreements in these town hall meetings will be civil and friendly, but they will also be clear for all to see,” McCain said. “On tax policy, healthcare reform, trade, government spending and a long list of other issues, we offer very different choices to the American people. And those choices will have very different consequences for American workers and small-business owners.”

The Obama campaign responded with a morning conference call featuring Jason Furman, the Illinois senator’s economic policy director, who blasted McCain’s speech as full of “misstatements, distortion and omission.”

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) went line by line through McCain’s speech and criticized the Arizona senator for adopting President Bush’s tax policies and failing to offer a comprehensive healthcare plan.

“The fact is, the Bush-McCain healthcare plan isn’t designed to help small businesses,” Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, said in a morning e-mail. “It’s designed for folks who are already healthy and wealthy enough to afford healthcare at any price.”

McCain’s speech was interrupted early, and somewhat surprisingly, by three female anti-war protesters who managed to infiltrate the small room and audience, which was not open to the public and screened by the Secret Service.

As McCain began to walk through what he would do for small businesses, he was interrupted by the first protester, who started shouting, “War is bad for small business.”

All three of the protesters were immediately escorted from the meeting, leaving McCain to make jokes to recover his momentum.