Fresh off his week long Hawaiian vacation, Barack Obama accused McCain of going negative by running a television ad that says an Obama election spells economic disaster. It’s a “same, old tired campaign” tactic Obama says Republicans have utilized “every four years for the last who knows how long.”

“They don’t have something positive to say about what they’re going to do for America. What they try to do is they say, ‘Well this other guy, he’s unpatriotic. Or, ‘This other guy, he likes French people.’ That’s what they said about Kerry. Or you know, they try to make it out like somehow Democrats aren’t tough enough or aren’t macho enough,” he said, recalling the 2004 campaign.

While the strategy has been effective in winning elections, Obama says it hasn’t helped the country’s woes. “That’s their strategy and they do it every four years and then you end up with what we’ve got right now. I have news for John McCain – my plan’s not gonna bring about economic disaster - we already have economic disaster from John McCain’s president George W. Bush, and we can’t afford another four years or eight years of George Bush policies, and that’s why we are gonna beat John McCain in this election to put America on a new path,” he said.

Just a few minutes later when Obama opened the floor open to questions, one of his own supporters turned downright negative when he ridiculed McCain’s service to the country in Vietnam, and made light of his time as a POW. “Now everything that he talks about is how much he suffered, he was the fattest prisoner that got off the plane,” the man said.

Before responding to the man’s concerns about the economy, Obama took a moment to denounce the man’s comments. Addressing the man, Obama said, “Respectfully I’m gonna disagree with you when it comes to McCain and his service. I think his policies are terrible, I think his service was honorable and I think he deserves respect for that,” Obama said.

“But, I think your general point about his policies though are absolutely right. I mean, look, John McCain wants to present himself as a maverick, right? He always says, ‘I’m a maverick, I’m a maverick, I’m a maverick.’ Let me tell you something, every single one of his top people are all lobbyists for the very special interests that have been dominating Washington all these years,” he continued, showing he’s still willing to put up a fight.

Minutes after he told voters at a Reno, Nevada, rally that his opponents were trying to “run [him] down,” Senator Barack Obama held a media availability today to declare truce with his main competitors - Senators Clinton and Edwards. But mainly Senator Clinton.

“I wanted to take the time to talk to all of you a little bit because I’ve been a little concerned about the tenor the campaign has been going over the last couple of days,” Obama said to a roomful of reporters. “I thought it would be useful for me to just air this out a little bit,” he continued.

“I think over the last couple days you’ve seen a tone on the Democratic side in the campaign that I think is unfortunate,” he stated. “I may disagree with Senator Clinton or Senator Edwards on how to get there, but we share the same goals. We’re all Democrats.” He praised Edwards and Clinton as “patriots” who have the best interests of the country at heart, but urged all campaigns to “focus on the work that needs to get done” during this important time in our history. “I don’t want the campaign at this stage to degenerate into so much tit for tat back and forth that we lose sight of why we are all doing this,” he said.

This unscheduled announcement came just one day after Senator Clinton accused Senator Obama of trying to distort her comments on Martin Luther King, Jr., and challenged the consistency of his position on the war in Iraq. And, lest we forget, one day after BET founder and Clinton supporter, Bob Johnson, insinuated (and later denied) that while Clintons were deeply involved in “black issues”, Barack Obama was doing drugs. [His exact quote per FOX News' Aaron Bruns was, "I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing that he said it in his book."]

Senator Obama took questions from six reporters - Time’s Mark Halperin asked if Senator Obama would change his rhetoric about the Clintons and Nedra Pickler from the Associated Press questioned Obama on whether he thought the Clintons had been racially insensitive in light of recent comments Senator Clinton made about Martin Luther King, Jr., and those of her husband calling the Obama campaign a “fairy tale.”

Watch Obama’s opening statement and his response to those two questions here:

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