Singer Patti LaBelle performs at 'Every Woman For Obama' Voter Registration Rally at UCLA in Los Angeles last Sunday. - AP

WASHINGTON (AP):

Democrat Barack Obama was playing to his strength yesterday with plans to unveil an economic rescue plan for middle-class Americans, bidding to extend his lead in the polls ahead of this week's final presidential debate with Republican John McCain.

The scary US economic picture has dominated the 2008 White House contest and those fears only grew last week as the stock market plunged nearly 20 per cent, wiping away billions of dollars in retirement savings. Tens of thousands of Americans already have lost their homes to mortgage foreclosures and unemployment was on the rise.

McCain, who is perceived as having reacted unevenly through the economic storm, acknowledged on Sunday that the issue was hurting his campaign.

10 point lead

"We're a couple points down, OK, nationally, but we're right in this game," the veteran Arizona senator said to campaign volunteers assembled at his headquarters outside Washington. "The economy has hurt us a little bit in the last week or two, but in the last few days we've seen it come back up because they want experience, they want knowledge and they want vision. We'll give that to America."

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Obama with a 10-point lead, 53-43 per cent, among likely voters with an even larger two-to-one margin among voters who put the economy as the top issue in the campaign. The poll, conducted by telephone October 8 to 11, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 points for the sample of 766 likely voters.

Hoping to build on McCain's weakness, Obama planned what his campaign said would be "a major policy address to lay out his economic rescue plan for the middle class." The 47-year-old freshman Illinois senator was to appear in Toledo, Ohio, a critical swing state where the race may be decided. Polls show the contest there is close.

McCain, meanwhile, dialled back personal attacks on Obama over the weekend that have been prominent recently in the Republican campaign, but vowed he would "whip" his opponent's "you know what" in Wednesday's last debate of three debates of the campaign.