Obama in Asheville, North Carolina

With just a month to go until election day, I know you’ve all been hearing a lot about politics out here in North Carolina. I know you’ve been seeing a lot of ads, and getting a lot of calls, and reading a lot about this election in the newspaper.

But none of you need the papers, or ads on TV, or folks like me to tell you what this election is all about. You know what’s at stake. You’re living it.

Here in Asheville, and across America, you’ve seen your incomes go down as the price of just about everything has gone way up. It’s harder to pay the bills. Harder to send your kids to college. Harder to save enough to retire.

And on Friday, we learned that we’d lost another 159,000 American jobs in September. It was the ninth straight month of job losses – more than three quarters of a million this year, including 24,000 here in North Carolina. And it came just as we finished a week in which our financial markets teetered on the brink of disaster.

Yet instead of addressing these crises, Senator McCain’s campaign has announced that they plan to turn the page on the discussion about our economy and spend the final weeks of this campaign launching Swiftboat-style attacks on me.

Think about that for a second. Turn the page on the economy? We’re facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and John McCain wants us to "turn the page?" Well, I know the policies he’s supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend. I can understand why Senator McCain would want to "turn the page" and ignore this economy.

But I also know this:

You’re trying to pay your bills every week and stay above the water – you can’t ignore it.

You’re worrying about whether your job will be there a month from now – you can’t ignore it.

You’re worrying about whether you can pay your mortgage and stay in your house – you can’t turn the page.

In 30 days you are going to elect the next president, and you need and deserve a president who is going to wake up every day and fight for you, and fight for the middle class, and fight to create jobs and grow our economy again -- not another president who doesn’t get it. Not another President who ignores our problems. Not more of the same.

Senator McCain and his operatives are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. They’d rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up. It’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time.

I want you to know that I’m going to keep on talking about the issues that matter – about the economy and health care and education and energy. I’m going to keep on standing up for hard working families. We’re not going to let John McCain distract us from what we need to do to move this country forward.

Because November 4th, you and I are going to turn the page on the disastrous economic policies of George W. Bush and John McCain.
--Senator Barack Obama