WASHINGTON — Senator McCain will outline his small business agenda this morning, a day after Senator Obama launched a broadside on his economic platform and suggested the Arizona Republican’s fiscal policy would be worse than that of President Bush.

The newly crowned Democratic standard-bearer criticized Mr. McCain on a range of policy fronts as he opened an economic tour of battleground states to court blue-collar voters who backed Senator Clinton in the primary.

RELATED: McCain Warns of Broad Tax Hikes Under Obama | Obama Taps Wal-Mart Defender As Director of Economic Policy | Obama-Nomics.

During a speech in Raleigh, N.C., Mr. Obama touted his support for an additional $50 billion stimulus package to aid the unemployed and homeowners facing foreclosure.

Mr. McCain’s proposed remedies for the housing crisis, Mr. Obama said, would do little for Americans struggling amid the economic slowdown.

“President Bush told the American people he thought the biggest danger arising from this housing crisis was the temptation to do something about it,” he said. “Now Senator McCain wants to turn Bush’s policy of ‘too little, too late’ into a policy of ‘even less, even later.’ That’s not the change we need right now. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.”

For weeks, Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders have sought to link the presumptive Republican nominee with the unpopular president, arguing that Mr. McCain would represent a “third Bush term.” The Obama campaign ramped up the rhetoric even further yesterday.

“When it comes to tax policy, that’s actually unfair to President Bush. John McCain’s tax policy is far more radical,” Mr. Obama’s director of economic policy, Jason Furman, told reporters on a conference call.

Mr. Furman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was recently hired for the general election after advising Senator Kerry during the 2004 campaign, said Mr. McCain’s plans to extend the Bush tax cuts, slash the corporate tax rate, and repeal the alternative minimum tax would add “trillions” to the budget deficit.

Mr. McCain is scheduled to address a small business summit this morning in Washington, D.C., where a spokesman said he will push proposals to give companies more flexibility to create jobs and boost wages, particularly in light of the rising unemployment rate.

The senator hit back at Mr. Obama in an interview on “NBC Nightly News” last night, saying his platform amounted to old-style tax-and-spend policy. “Senator Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third term,” Mr. McCain said. “It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.”

McCain advisers defended their candidate’s policy agenda yesterday after Mr. Obama’s speech, saying that keeping taxes low would help the economy and that cutting the corporate rate would encourage businesses to add jobs in America, rather than overseas.

They said Mr. Obama had glossed over his plans to raise taxes — such as those on capital gains and dividends — in areas that would hurt middle-income Americans, and not just the wealthiest, as he has claimed.

“The speech we heard today is what the American people are sick and tired of,” a McCain surrogate, Senator Burr of North Carolina, told reporters on a conference call, saying Mr. Obama was blaming others for the economic woes despite his record of supporting tax hikes.

Mr. Obama spoke yesterday on the first day of a two-week economic tour of key swing states, including Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida. The move focuses the campaign away from foreign policy — where Mr. McCain is seen as stronger — and allows Mr. Obama to reach out immediately to the lower-income voters who rallied around Mrs. Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

To that end, the Illinois senator paid tribute to Mrs. Clinton at the outset, and he scrapped lines that he had used often during the primary campaign that placed some of the blame for the current economic downturn on policies of the Clinton administration, such as the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Instead, he pointed out that President Clinton left office with a $5.6 trillion projected surplus; Mr. Obama said only that economic problems that preceded Mr. Bush were the result of “forces that have globalized our economy over the last several decades.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers, when asked about the shift, similarly placed the onus squarely on the Bush administration. “When nature handed them lemons, they didn’t make lemonade. They made lemon juice,” a senior economic adviser to the campaign, Austan Goolsbee, said of the Bush team.

Mr. Goolsbee said Mr. Obama’s long-term economic proposals would not add to the deficit.

In the short term, he is pushing for an extension of unemployment benefits and aid to homeowners. He is also advocating additional rebates for taxpayers, but Mr. Goolsbee said the campaign had not specified an amount for the proposed rebates or when they should be sent out.