World Oct. 22, 2008 - 03:50AM JST ( 21 )

BENSALEM, Pa —

Trailing in the polls just 14 days before the presidential election, John McCain said that “nothing is inevitable” as he campaigned Tuesday in the key blue-collar state of Pennsylvania.

But while McCain appeared to revel in his underdog status, campaign insiders were reportedly ready to concede defeat in the key states of Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico, with one senior adviser telling CNN they were “gone.”

Giving up on those battleground states would leave McCain a painfully narrow path to the 270 electoral votes needed to reach the White House.

He would have to win swing states Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina and New Hampshire, hold onto Missouri and still flip Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes to stop Obama reaching 270.

He can afford to lose North Carolina or Virginia if he wins Pennsylvania but McCain is currently down 11 points there and is trailing by smaller margins in most recent polls of the remaining swing states.

But campaign officials said there was still time to turn the tide.

“We see the race tightening both internally and in public polling,” said communication director Jill Hazelbaker.

“We are within striking distance in the key battleground states we need to win.”

The latest daily tracking poll of registered voters by Gallup showed Obama expanding his lead to 11 points nationwide. The daily Rasmussen survey, however, had McCain narrowing the race to four points, trailing Obama by 46% to 50% of voters nationwide.

With Obama stepping out of the race on Thursday and Friday to be with his ailing grandmother in Hawaii, McCain will be able to dominate media coverage as he campaigns aggressively in battleground states.

He has three events scheduled in Pennsylvania Tuesday before flying to New Hampshire ahead of a Wednesday morning rally.

He will meet up with running mate Sarah Palin, who has been instrumental in rallying the Republican party’s conservative base, in Ohio that afternoon before flying to Florida for a Thursday rally.

The pair have been attacking Obama as a shifty, job-killing socialist bent on “redistributing wealth” as they seek to cast themselves as the defenders of hard-working Americans like the now famous plumber Joe Wurzelbacher.

“Senator Obama’s more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than growing the pie,” McCain warned a few hundred supporters at a rally in a factory in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

“When I’m elected president, I won’t fine small businesses and families with children. Senator Obama will. He will force them and you into a new huge government run health care program, while he keeps the cost of the fine a secret until he hits you with it.”

McCain said Obama would not have “the right response” to a crisis on the international stage and warned he was planning “to raise taxes, increase spending, and concede defeat in Iraq.”

He castigated the “pundits who wrote off our campaign on numerous occasions” and told his cheering supporters “we’ve got them just where we want them.”

“Nothing is inevitable here. We never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.”

Earlier, Obama accused McCain of launching an “ugly” bid to stave off defeat as he blitzed the crucial swing state of Florida, where early voting opened Monday, with one-time foe Hillary Clinton.

“In the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over,” Obama said in Tampa.

“We’ve seen it before and we’re seeing it again—ugly phone calls, misleading mail, misleading TV ads, careless, outrageous comments,” Obama said.

“It’s getting so bad that even Senator McCain’s running mate denounced his tactics last night ... You really have to work hard to violate Governor Palin’s standards on negative campaigning.”

Palin, who has launched some of the most stinging attacks against Obama, said Sunday that if she were in charge, she would not rely on “the old conventional ways of campaigning, that includes those robo-calls.”

The McCain campaign has been using automated calls to question Obama’s character and values in a bid to drive up his negative ratings in swing states.

Wire reports