John McCain and Barack Obama are heading into the final week of the presidential campaign planning to spend nearly all their time in states that President Bush won last time, testimony to the increasingly dire position of McCain and his party as election day approaches.With optimism brimming in Democratic circles, Obama presents on Monday what aides described as a summing-up speech for his campaign in Canton, Ohio, reprising the themes he first presented in February 2007, when he began his campaign for the presidency.From here on out, Obama’s aides said, attacks on McCain will be joined by an emphasis on broader and less partisan themes, like the need to unify the country after a difficult election. McCain has settled on Pennsylvania as the one state that Democrats won in 2004 where he has a decent chance of winning, a view not shared by Obama’s advisers.But McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin are planning to spend most of their time in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana, all states that Republicans had entered the campaign thinking they could bank on.As Obama uses his money and political organisation to expand the political map, McCain is being forced to shore up support in Indiana and North Carolina that have not been contested for decades. His decision to campaign on Sunday in Iowa, a day after Palin campaigned there, was questioned even by Republicans who noted polls that showed Obama pulling away there. Republicans and Democrats said there were signs that two states that had once appeared overwhelmingly Republican, Georgia and South Carolina, were tightening, in part, because of surge of early-voting by African-Americans. An Obama win in the states seemed unlikely but it is a sign of how volatile a year this is that more states would seem to be coming into play, rather than being settled, as the election approaches.The contours of these final days suggest a culmination of a strategy that Obama’s advisers put in place at the beginning: to use his huge fund-raising edge to try to put as many states in play as possible and overwhelm McCain in the final days of the race.“It’s now a big map, so you have to be in a lot of states over the last eight days,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager.As of right now, Pennsylvania is the only Democratic-leaning state Obama is planning to visit. Obama also is making a vigorous push in Florida, after a campaign stop there last week convinced his advisers that he has a real shot of winning there.
