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WASHINGTON (AP) -- With voters sour on the status quo, Republican John McCain plans to spend the next five months arguing that he has a history of fighting to reform government and that Democrat Barack Obama talks of change with nothing to show for it.

''I have a record of doing that, not a rhetoric of doing that,'' McCain told an audience last week, claiming he long has taken a bipartisan approach to fixing the country's ills while suggesting that Obama simply offers empty promises of working across party lines.

The four-term Arizona senator was forecasting his overarching general election theme against the fresh-faced first-term Illinois senator.

McCain will start making his case in earnest Tuesday during a prime-time speech in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, La., a searing symbol of government inaction after Hurricane Katrina. It's meant to coincide with the final Democratic primaries in South Dakota and Montana and, thus, mark the start of the general election.

The Republican nominee-in-waiting plans to draw contrasts with Obama on a range of issues and argue that the Democrat offers the wrong kind of change while he offers the right kind. An advertising campaign is expected to reinforce that message in the coming weeks.

Previewing his remarks, McCain told reporters on his campaign bus in Nashville, Tenn.: ''The message is change. It's real change. I think it's clear I have a record of working across the aisle. Senator Obama does not. I think it's my record of reform and efforts to change the way we do business in Washington. He has the most liberal voting record of any senator in the U.S. Senate.''

An Obama spokesman responded by arguing that despite McCain's ''occasional independence'' from the GOP, he has embraced most of President Bush's agenda. ''No matter how hard he tries to spin it otherwise, that kind of record is simply not the change the American people are looking for or deserve,'' Bill Burton said.

For weeks now, Obama has been portraying McCain as a Washington insider who offers nothing more than a third term of Bush and a continuation of partisan politics that turns off people.

''I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations, but the one thing they don't represent is change,'' Obama said recently.

By any measure, McCain faces difficult odds in an environment favoring Democrats; much of the country disapproves of the direction the country is headed amid a weak economy and the Iraq war. Given such conditions, it's hard for even some Republicans to see how the party retains the White House.

Nonetheless, Republicans say they still see a path for McCain to satisfy the public's hunger for change.

They point to his carefully honed image over decades as an independent thinker who has broken with the GOP's right flank on issues that include the funding of embryonic stem cell research, an eventual path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants and the push to get money out of politics. They argue that his work with Democrats on those and other topics, like fighting climate change, as well as his seemingly one-man crusades against issues like wasteful government spending, shows he's not a politics-as-usual candidate.

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