Obama took the fight to McSame on Monday, kicking off a two-week campaign tour of battleground states, and he came out swinging, attacking the economic policies of John Walker McBush, and making the economy the central theme of this leg of the general election campaign.

In his most pointed and sustained attack on Mr. McCain’s economic agenda, Mr. Obama said that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of President Bush’s faltering economic policies. And he highlighted his own proposals to aid economically beleaguered Americans: tax cuts for middle-income families and retirees, a $50 billion economic stimulus package, expansion of unemployment benefits, and relief for homeowners facing foreclosure.

The speech was made at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, the heart of red country, a state that hasn’t gone to the Democrat since fellow southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Obama is ceding nothing, instead he is going into the heart of the fever swamp and throwing down the gauntlet. He went to North Carolina with a message not of limiting government, but of effective government. He drew sharp contrasts between himself and the republican nominee, especially on issues of economics, where by McCain’s own admission he is ignorant as dirt.

Obama spoke of hard working people, hard pressed to buy food and gasoline, and he laid the blame where it belongs, at the feet of aWol bu$h and his rubberstamp cornies in the congress, chief among them McCain, who, when he has bothered to cast votes in the Senate over the last year has voted the way bu$h wanted him to 100% of the time. He highlighted More-of-the-Same’s insistence that tax breaks for corporations are what will get us out of trouble, because as we all know, applying the same thinking that got you into trouble always gets you out!

“We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history. This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid. It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long,” Obama told a crowd of about 900 people. “We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well, we’ve been there once. We’re not going back.”

Congress dealt up a dissing of the squatter that currently occupies the oval as well, announcing that they would work with Barack Obama to craft solutions to palliate America’s ills, bypassing the current president and moving on to the next one. Illustrating this fact, the House Democrats said they intended to force a separate vote this week – possibly Thursday – on extending unemployment benefits for those whose aid is running out. The extension is opposed by bu$h and many congressional republicans, and bu$h has threatened a veto. The Democrats are drooling over the political hay they could make out of a veto, and are all but daring him to do it.