WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – With Barack Obama in the Middle East, John McCain returned to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday, focusing on energy policy and his Democratic rival’s position regarding the Iraq war.

Speaking at a town hall meeting here, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said that Obama, even after visiting Iraq, was showing “a remarkable failure to understand the facts on the ground” by continuing to call for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq on a fixed timetable.

Pursuing such a policy, McCain said, would “risk losing all the hard-fought gains” achieved by the United States and would raise the possibility that the American military might have to return to Iraq in the future.

“My friends, when I’m president of the United States, we will come home,” said McCain, who opposes any timetable. “We will come home with victory and honor. But we’ll never have to go back because we will have won this conflict.”

And McCain repeated the accusation, which he first made Tuesday in New Hampshire, that Obama’s policy on the war represented the triumph of political expediency over the national interest.

“So apparently, Sen. Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a campaign,” McCain said to the applause of many in the crowd of roughly 800.

Obama has said that he is committed to the withdrawal of U.S. troops but would allow some flexibility in his proposed 16-month timeline depending on events and the advice of commanders. He has also said that he would leave a residual force of unspecified size in Iraq on a longer-term basis.

On energy, McCain spoke of the need for a new round of exploratory drilling offshore in hopes of increasing domestic oil supplies.

He asserted that last week’s announcement by the Bush administration that it was lifting a presidential ban on drilling has helped bring down oil prices. A congressional ban remains in place.

McCain also voiced support for various alternative sources of energy including the wind, the tides and the sun, as well as clean coal and battery-operated automobiles. And he pointed out that he, unlike Obama, is an ardent supporter of nuclear power.

“I want to build 45 nuclear power plants by 2030,” McCain said, “and that would create 700,000 jobs.”

The Republican candidate, who was making his fourth visit to Pennsylvania in the last six weeks, also said that as president he’d be open to instituting something akin to “question time” – as practiced in the British House of Commons.

In Britain, the prime minister periodically engages in a spirited back-and-forth with legislators from his own party and the opposition.

“I think it’d be fun,” McCain said, who raised the idea himself. “Anything that gets more Americans interested and involved in the process – I like it.”

Tim June, 52, an investment adviser from the nearby town of Dallas, said: “You never know, but I think Obama as president would be a party guy. We don’t have to guess about McCain. He’s a country guy. We’ve got some big problems in this country, and he’s our last best hope.”

After the town hall meeting, which was held at the F.M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts, McCain attended a closed-door fundraiser in Wilkes-Barre. Then, he visited a supermarket in Bethlehem before going to a shopping mall there to open his Lehigh Valley headquarters.

McCain and his strategists have made it clear that they consider Pennsylvania key to the national outcome in November.

For McCain to capture the state, he will have to win Northeastern Pennsylvania, much of which has a Democratic history and all of which has an older, more culturally conservative electorate than the state as a whole. Those latter factors could work to his benefit.

Another factor that buoys the McCain camp this time is how poorly Obama fared in the region against Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary this past April.

“I’m encouraged by what I saw today,” said Vivian Altman, 66, a lifelong Republican who left home in Westfield, Tioga County, at 4:30 a.m. and traveled 150 miles to hear the Arizona senator in Wilkes-Barre. “There were Democrats all around me in the crowd who said they were voting McCain.”

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PHOTOS (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): CAMPAIGN-MCCAIN

AP-NY-07-23-08 1906EDT