Obama pushes early voting; McCain bashes Bush policies

— -- Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who has tried to distance himself from President Bush, sharply criticized his policies in an interview Thursday as he hit the key battleground state of Florida to attack Barack Obama's tax policies.

McCain, crisscrossing parts of the Sunshine State by bus, hammered away at economic issues as the Labor Department reported larger than expected new claims for jobless benefits.

Obama, the Democratic presidential contender, stopped in Indianapolis, a traditionally Republican stronghold, to encourage supporters to vote early. He then planned to head to Hawaii to visit his ailing 85-year-old grandmother.

As national and battleground polls continued to show McCain facing an uphill battle 12 days before the presidential election, the Republican senator lashed out at Bush policies in his interview with The Washington Times.

"Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the (financial) regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously," McCain said.

He also rejected the president's practice of issuing "signing statements" when he signs bills into law, in which the president has suggested that he would ignore elements of the bills, labeling them potentially unconstitutional.

"I would veto the bills or say, 'Look, I don't like it but I'll obey the law that's passed by Congress and signed by the president,'" McCain said. "I think the signing statements was not a correct implementation of the power of the executive. I think it was overstepping," he said.

McCain strongly rejected Bush's claims of executive privilege, often used to shield the White House from scrutiny.

"I don't agree with that either. I don't agree with (Vice President) Dick Cheney's allegation that he's part of both the legislative and the executive branch," he said.