PHILADELPHIA -- Sen. Barack Obama yesterday assailed the Bush administration's economic policies as serving "the interests of the wealthy and the well-connected, no matter what the cost to working families," and charged that Sen. John McCain would bring more of the same.

"John McCain said a few weeks ago that 'the issue of economics is not something I understood as well as I should' -- and that's clear since all he's offering is more of the same Bush policies that have put the American Dream out of reach for so many Americans," Mr. Obama told leaders of the state's labor unions at the AFL-CIO convention here.

Mr. Obama spoke a day after his Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been endorsed by some unions while Mr. Obama has been endorsed by others. In her address Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton compared herself to Philadelphia and Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky" as the underdog in the nomination battle.

In Pennsylvania, however, Mrs. Clinton has had the advantage in the consensus of pre-primary polls -- Quinnipiac University's latest survey found her with a reduced but still significant nine point lead yesterday -- although one new survey from Public Policy Polling stood out as an intriguing statistical outlier in depicting Mr. Obama with a slim lead in the state.

Also yesterday, Mr. Obama received a trio of high-profile endorsements, from former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, the former co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Gov. Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming, and former Sen. John Melcher of South Dakota.

His other new supporters, while less well-known nationally, were significant in that they added to the Illinois senator's mounting superdelegate total. Those 800-odd party elders remain the key to Mrs. Clinton's hopes of overcoming Mr. Obama's lead in elected delegates.

She retains an edge with that group -- 250 to 220, according to the latest Associated Press tally -- although her lead has eroded steadily through the first quarter of 2008 as new endorsers have flocked overwhelmingly toward the Obama camp.

Mr. Obama has just completed a six-day bus tour of Pennsylvania. His personal campaigning has been complemented by a television advertising wave across the state whose depth has reflected the significant financial advantage he holds over the Clinton campaign.

While conceding that they expected to be far outspent on the airwaves, Mrs. Clinton's advisers spotlighted their first television commercial of the Pennsylvania campaign yesterday.

It was a variant of the widely noted 3 a.m. phone call ad that debuted during the Texas contest early last month. This version focuses on the economy and the candidacy of Republican Sen. John McCain rather than her primary opponent.

In a conference call yesterday afternoon, Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton's spokesman, declined to say how much the campaign would be spending on the ad, but he described their buy as "substantial" and insisted that the campaign, while expecting to be outspent, had the resources to sustain an effective advertising presence in Pennsylvania.

After leaving the Center City ballroom, Mr. Obama had his own "Rocky" interlude as he toured South Philadelphia's Italian Market, sampling salami, cheese, and sympathizing with food importers over the inflationary wallop of the tanking dollar.

It was one more opportunity for the candidate to burnish his regular-guy cred as he has across the state during his bus tour, with forays into sports bars, hot dog stands and, infamously, into an Altoona bowling alley.

The latter expedition was so disastrous for the competitive senator that he told the labor leaders he planned to tear up the bowling alley in the White House.

Mr. Obama spent the afternoon at a town meeting, followed by an appearance on MSNBC's Chris Matthews show. Both took place the Philadelphia suburbs, the focus of intense concern by both campaigns as the key swing region in the Pennsylvania contest.

In Wallingford, he told a questioner that he hoped to appoint former Vice President Al Gore as his adviser on climate change.

"I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem," he said, according to The Associated Press. "He's somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues."

Mr. Matthews pressed the senator on why he did not leave his Chicago church to protest the rhetoric of his former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. Obama defended the church and said, as he has previously, that while he had heard "controversial" comments from Mr. Wright, he had not heard the more incendiary statements now widely circulated in video clips.

The footage, he said, "compressed the most offensive things that a pastor said over the course of 30 years and just ran it over and over and over again. There were those other 30 years -- I never heard him say those things that were in those clips."

The new Quinnipiac University survey released yesterday confirmed Mrs. Clinton as the front-runner in the Pennsylvania primary even as she trails the Illinois senator in the national polls and in the all-important tally of elected delegates. The new survey of likely voters showed the New Yorker leading Mr. Obama 50 percent to 41 percent, a margin slightly down from her 53 percent to 41 percent edge in a Quinnipiac survey early in March.

The poll showed both Democrats ahead of Mr. McCain in a general election trial heat in the state, with Mrs. Clinton doing somewhat better against the GOP standard-bearer. She led the Arizona senator 48 percent to 40 percent; while Mr. Obama was ahead in a tighter race, 43 percent to 39 percent.

The other survey released yesterday, by the North Carolina firm, Public Policy Polling, offered the contrary and more surprising finding that Mr. Obama had, for the first time, actually moved ahead of Mrs. Clinton in the state, by a margin of 45 percent to 43 percent.

After an intense week of campaigning, the two candidates both left the state yesterday. Both are expected to return as soon as next week although neither campaign released any details of their pending Pennsylvania schedules. While his wife campaigns and raises money elsewhere, former President Clinton was scheduled to be in Altoona today.