Obama has a clear 9-point lead over McCain

Washington: Democrat Presidential contender Barack Obama has gained his first clear 9-point lead over rival John McCain.

A new Washington Post-ABC News survey released on Wednesday showed him nine points ahead of his Republican rival, with 52 percent against McCain's 43 percent.

A different survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed people favoring the Democrat on the economy, with 47 percent saying he would best handle the financial turmoil, as opposed to 35 percent who favored McCain.

The Pew poll also showed that Americans back the Bush administration's $700 billion bailout plan by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, prompting both candidates to be in rare agreement on the proposal, each demanding on Tuesday that it be subject to independent oversight and guarantees that top executives will not be rewarded.

The survey, conducted between Friday and Monday, showed 57 percent of voters believed the government was doing the right thing in dealing with the economic crisis.

McCain has tried to tie Obama to troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and has called on Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines both Obama supporters and former Fannie Mae executives to return large ''golden parachute'' payments they received from the corporations after leaving.

But McCain's campaign manager Ric Davis drew some unwelcome attention in news reports Tuesday that Freddie Mac had been paying $15,000 a month to Davis' lobbying firm until shortly before the takeover.

The money to the Davis firm was on top of more than $30,000 a month that went directly to McCain's campaign chief for five years starting in 2000. The $30,000 a month came from both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which were rescued by the government earlier this month.

The McCain campaign said Davis left the firm Davis Manafort and stopped taking salary from the firm in 2006.

A person familiar with the contract, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the $15,000 a month in payments to Davis' firm began around the end of 2005 and continued until the past month or so. All the payments were first reported by The New York Times.

McCain's campaign issued a lengthy broadside against the newspaper early Wednesday, calling the report ''demonstrably false'' and declaring it a ''partisan assault aimed at promoting that paper's preferred candidate, Barack Obama.''

The response did not address the reported $15,000 month payments to Davis Manafort, but focused on Davis having separated himself from the firm in 2006.

McCain had a full schedule Wednesday, mainly consumed by meetings with the leaders of Georgia, Ukraine and India as world leaders assembled in New York for the U.N. General Assembly.

Early Wednesday, he met with a panel of business executives to discuss the bailout. They included former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, his one-time rival for the Republican nomination, and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

McCain said he wanted to discuss ''how we can make sure that the American people regain confidence on Main Street so that they can regain their confidence in Wall Street and in Washington.''

He renewed his insistence that the bailout deal should have greater transparency, oversight and CEO accountability to make it acceptable to voters.

His running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was back at the United Nations on Wednesday, after meeting there with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Colombian leader Alvaro Uribe a day earlier.

The meetings were designed to introduce the once-little-known vice presidential nominee to the world community and to counter claims she has no grounding in foreign affairs.

Obama on Wednesday planned a rally in Florida where he was spending most of his time closeted with aides in preparation for Friday's presidential debate, which will focus on foreign policy.

His running mate Joe Biden, was busy on the campaign trail, questioning McCain's judgment in the Obama campaign's strongest criticism to date about their Republican rival's leadership abilities.

Biden listed several examples of what he described as McCain's wrong judgment, such as his contention that the US would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the Persian Gulf nation is the central front in the war on terrorism.

Biden argued that the president should focus the full US might on al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

''John is more than wrong he is dangerously wrong. On a question so basic, so fundamental, so critical to our nation's security, we can't afford a commander in chief so divorced from reality and from America's most basic national interests,'' Biden said while campaigning in Ohio.

His comments on Wednesday were billed by the campaign as a major speech on foreign policy by the veteran chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.