A New Landscape, the Same Proposals

"Both of them would dig the hole way deeper," he said.

Campaigning yesterday in Green Bay, Wis., Obama outlined proposals to tighten federal ethics and contracting rules and bring unprecedented scrutiny to the legislative process, including through a new clearinghouse to assess corporate tax breaks.

His speech, outlining an 11-page "Plan to Reform the Greed and Excesses of Washington," built on the regulatory overhaul for the financial services industry that he proposed last week. To curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama would have all bill writing be conducted in public. Congress holds public hearings on legislation, and lawmakers debate and vote in the open, but the conference committees where final language is crafted meet mostly behind closed doors.

Obama also would create a government agency "charged with identifying recipients of corporate subsidies and evaluating the effectiveness of these subsidies in promoting growth and opportunity." All corporate tax breaks would be easily searchable on a government Web site, and if the new entity deemed a provision to be a dud, it would be targeted for elimination.

McCain, seconding calls from Democratic leaders in Congress, said yesterday that any bailout bill must include an oversight board to account for the expenditures of public money. He said that executives of financial firms receiving federal bailout money should see their salaries limited to $400,000, the highest pay of a federal worker -- in that case, the president.

"We will not solve a problem caused by poor oversight with a plan that has no oversight," McCain said at a rally in Scranton, Pa.

Beyond the speeches, much of the day continued to be consumed by the kind of attacks and counterattacks that have dominated the campaign recently.

Among the issues yesterday: the $42 million "golden parachute" that McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina received in 2005 after being ousted from Hewlett-Packard, a new McCain campaign ad suggesting Obama was "born of the corrupt Chicago political machine," a new Obama campaign ad criticizing McCain for a news article in which he suggested opening health care to competition "as we have done over the last decade in banking," and even the New York Times' coverage of McCain.

McCain said Obama had "declined to put forth a plan" to deal with the Wall Street meltdown, an assertion that is exaggerated at best. Obama said McCain "has fought time and time again against the common-sense rules of the road that could've prevented this crisis," neglecting to mention that his new brain trust on the crisis includes two Clinton administration Treasury secretaries, Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, who helped negotiate the deregulation of the financial services industries in 1999.

In an interview on Friday, Rubin said the law, named after its now-retired congressional sponsors -- Phil Gramm (Tex.), a top McCain economic adviser; Jim Leach (Iowa), who heads Republicans for Obama; and Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (Va.) -- "had no impact, zero," on the current crisis.

"I would hope the two candidates would have tried to bolster confidence and stop sniping over this," Penner said.

Staff writer Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.