McCain: Obama trying to ‘exploit’ financial crisis

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Saturday morning that Democratic rival Barack Obama is trying to use the ongoing financial crisis for political gain instead of offering solutions.

In his weekly radio address, the Arizona Republican said he "can't shake the impression that Barack Obama is trying so hard to exploit America's financial crisis that he hasn't really focused on how to solve it."

{mosads}As the nation has fallen further into economic despair, Obama's poll numbers have surged while McCain's have plummeted.

In last week's debate, McCain introduced what he's calling a Homeownership Resurgence Plan, an idea he pushed in his address Saturday.

"It's a simple idea," McCain said. "Take some of the money that Congress has already committed to fixing our financial system and use it to give millions of homeowners a new mortgage and a fresh start. No default. No bankruptcy. No foreclosure. No deteriorating neighborhoods. The United States government will support the refinancing of distressed mortgages for homeowners and replace them with manageable mortgages."

Obama has said that McCain's plan is already covered in legislation Congress passed over the summer to address the housing crisis and most recently in the $700 billion rescue package, and the White House said this week that the Treasury Department already has the tools to do some of what McCain is suggesting.

McCain, however, said Obama tried to take credit for his idea before criticizing it.

"The response from Sen. Obama to my Homeownership Resurgence Plan was typical of his response to the entire crisis," McCain said. "First, Sen. Obama tried to claim that it was really his idea. But if anyone believed that claim, they didn't believe it for long because the very next day Sen. Obama and his campaign attacked my plan to stabilize mortgages. He claimed that the cost of the plan would place a burden to taxpayers — this from the same guy who plans to increase federal spending by 860 billion dollars. In reality, the money will come from funds already committed under the rescue package passed by Congress."

McCain and his campaign have struggled when discussing how to pay for the plan. The day after the debate a McCain senior adviser said the funds might come from either piece of the legislative bailout, and later in the week McCain said in an interview that the money might have to come from a new source.

On Saturday, however, he stressed that "the funds aren't new, but the priorities will be when we put the financial strength of our government back on the side of working families."