TOLEDO, Ohio — Evoking “Joe the Plumber” near his hometown in this pivotal state, Republican Sen. John McCain on Sunday cast himself as the guardian of middle-class workers and small-business owners who fuel the economy.

“If I’m elected president, I won’t raise taxes on small businesses, as Sen. (Barack) Obama proposes, and force them to cut jobs,” McCain said of his Democratic opponent during a rally at the convention center. “I will keep small business taxes where they are, help them keep their costs low and let them spend their earnings to create more jobs, not send to Washington.”

McCain flew to Toledo, near where “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher lives, from the state capital of Columbus amid the GOP’s push for this swing state and its 20 electoral votes.

The Holland, Ohio, plumber was in New York making the media rounds with his family, but McCain has been evoking his spirit after making him the focal point the final presidential debate between McCain and Obama.

During an earlier rally at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, McCain drew cheers when he proclaimed that he was campaigning “on behalf of Joe the Plumber and Rose the Teacher and Phil the Bricklayer and Wendy the Waitress.”

Obama, in North Carolina, said he is the one worried about “the cops and firefighters who keep us safe, … the waitresses who work double shifts, the cashiers at Wal-Mart, the plumbers fighting for the American Dream.”

He added: “John McCain thinks that giving these Americans a break is socialism. Well I call it opportunity, and there is nothing more American than that.”

McCain also distinguished between anti-Obama automated calls he is making in battleground states and similar calls made against him by George W. Bush during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina. Those calls suggested McCain was mentally unstable and had fathered a black daughter out of wedlock. The senator had adopted an orphan from Bangladesh.

McCain is now employing someone who made those calls against him to highlight Obama’s association with a Vietnam War radical.

“These are legitimate and truthful, and they are far different than the phone calls that were made about my family,” McCain said.

McCain complained during a nationally televised interview that the vast sums of money Obama is raising risk the post-Watergate financing reforms.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday” hours after Obama’s campaign reported raising a record $150 million in September, McCain said the overall sum his Democratic rival has raised — $605 million — showed the “dam has broken” for future White House races.