NEW ORLEANS, LA — It is on. Almost exactly three months after John McCain clinched his party’s nomination and he finally has his opponent.

With that in mind, expect McCain’s prime time speech tonight to lay out his principles and message for a general election campaign targeting the Illinois Democrat. The presumptive GOP nominee was reviewing his address and making final edits alongside longtime speech writer and senior adviser, Mark Salter, aboard his flight from Memphis to New Orleans which landed the Big Easy about an hour ago.

“The focus of this campaign will be clear from this speech. This is going to be a campaign organized around big ideas, big change,” Salter tells Fox. “It was clear to us before tonight what this election was all about. It’s change. We know. We have always known. (McCain is) the perfect candidate in that environment.”

Look for McCain to discuss how he ‘walked the walk’ of change before Obama was ever ‘talking the talk.’ Aides say we should expect McCain to stress his record of pushing for bipartisan reform tonight AND explain why Obama’s ideas for change are not only old and but also wrong for the future.

We saw McCain start to lay out this message as early as mid-February when he hit Obama on delivering an “eloquent but empty call for change,” and as recently as yesterday during his speech to AIPAC where he argued that Obama’s proposal for a diplomatic initiative to Iran’s leadership was tried by previous administrations and failed.

“McCain has gone and tried to change the institution of Congress and fought epic battles that have gone on for years. Senator Obama has done nothing like that,” Salter adds.

UPDATE 5:45pm—In speech excerpts (below), first leaked to Drudge Report this afternoon, McCain will also look to defend his maverick brand tonight against Democratic allegations that he is a clone of President Bush.

You will hear from my opponent’s campaign in every speech, every interview, every press release that I’m running for President Bush’s third term. You will hear every policy of the President described as the Bush-McCain policy. Why does Senator Obama believe it’s so important to repeat that idea over and over again? Because he knows it’s very difficult to get Americans to believe something they know is false. So he tries to drum it into your minds by constantly repeating it rather than debate honestly the very different directions he and I would take the country. But the American people didn’t get to know me yesterday, as they are just getting to know Senator Obama. They know I have a long record of bipartisan problem solving. They’ve seen me put our country before any President — before any party — before any special interest — before my own interest. They might think me an imperfect servant of our country, which I surely am. But I am her servant first, last and always. ….

I disagreed strongly with the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq. I called for the change in strategy that is now, at last, succeeding where the previous strategy had failed miserably. I was criticized for doing so by Republicans. I was criticized by Democrats. I was criticized by the press. But I don’t answer to them. I answer to you. And I would be ashamed to admit I knew what had to be done in Iraq to spare us from a defeat that would endanger us for years, but I kept quiet because it was too politically hard for me to do. No ambition is more important to me than the security of the country I have defended all my adult life.

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New Orleans, LA — During a trip to the still-ravaged and mostly abandoned Lower Ninth Ward Thursday, Sen. McCain repeatedly hammered President Bush for the government’s failure in the lead up and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

It was an important moment for the presumptive GOP nominee to distance himself from the unpopular president Democrats are hoping to attach him to in the fall.

ASHEVILLE, NC — Hillary Clinton isn’t all that impressed with John McCain’s trip to New Orleans — saying McCain may be right to blame the Bush administration for it’s Katrina response, but he’s wrong to leave tearing down the city’s flood-ravaged ninth ward on the table.

McCain told reporters aboard his Straight Talk Express bus that there should be “a conversation about what to do about it, rebuild it, tear it down, you know whatever it is.” Clinton told a crowd in North Carolina that razing the ninth ward is not an option.

“Senator McCain was down in New Orleans, where he said that President Bush had failed the country during Katrina and after. I agree,” she said. “The difference between Senator McCain and myself is that I have a long record of fighting to rebuild the Gulf and to help the citizens who live along the Gulf who were left to their own devices by their government.”

“In fact, Senator McCain said he might want to tear down the ninth ward instead of rebuilding it, but I went to the ninth ward after Katrina and met with people there and saw the destruction and I saw the resilience in their eyes, and they deserve our help to rebuild and regain their lives and their homes.

New Orleans, LA — “In all candor, if I had been President of the United States, I would have ordered the plane landed at the nearest air force base and I’d been over here,” McCain told reporters aboard his bus today.

Standing before a crowd of supporters in the Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans on Wednesday, John Edwards formally announced his plans to withdraw from the presidential race.

“It’s time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path,” Edwards said.

Dressed in blue jeans, the former North Carolina senator ended his campaign in the place where it had begun. The setting was symbolic for a man who made poverty the soul of his campaign. His decision to withdraw came as a surprise to many—the American public, members of the press, and even those within Edwards’ campaign. Though the senator had yet to win a single primary, his advisers consistently stated they would continue campaigning all the way to the convention—hoping to acquire enough delegates to remain viable in the race. On Monday, the campaign announced an aggressive media buy in several of the states scheduled to hold February 5th contests, and boasted of the recent surge in online donations.

But today a different decision was reached. Campaign spokesman, Mark Kornblau, said Edwards realized “he had no real path to the nomination” at this point in the race and “it was time to step aside.” Kornblau said Edwards spoke with senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama the night before, asking them to make poverty a central issue in their general election campaigns and in their administrations. He added that Edwards had no plans to endorse a candidate as of yet.

Edwards may no longer hold a place on the presidential ballot, but his populism, often expressed with great zeal, has impacted the presidential race in innumerable ways, some of which have yet to be realized.

At the heart of Edwards’ message was the need to speak out for the poor and disenfranchised—those people whom the Senator often referred to as “the real underdogs in this election.” He was the first to propose a universal health care plan—ensuring coverage for all Americans—and the first among the Democratic candidates to make poverty and global warming a key focus of his campaign.

For Edwards, the need to combat these problems was a “moral test,” and he referred to such issues as “the causes of my life.”

Not without fault, Edwards was sometimes criticized for his changing positions on the Iraq war and for oversimplifying the problem of lobbyists. Yet he was honest in admitting that his initial support of funding the war “was a mistake.”

Upon leaving an event in Springfield, Missouri, on Monday, that drew over 1,000 Edwards supporters, a high-school English teacher related his message to a line from Shakespeare she had recently taught her 12th grade class.

“To thine ownself be true,” she said, quoting a famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Edwards inspires because he’s pushed issues not always politically popular. And for that he deserves credit.”