WASHINGTON — With Barack Obama stepping off the playing field for a weeklong Hawaiian vacation, John McCain's campaign released three new attack ads yesterday, signaling that the senator from Arizona would use the void to continue pummeling the character of his rival for the White House.

Obama's trip to Hawai'i comes after a week in which his Republican opponent dominated the news with his negative assault. Obama aides said the senator from Illinois is maintaining his lead in polls and will not be goaded into responding with character attacks of his own.

But the assaults on him continued yesterday, with new television ads and a radio spot portraying Obama as a lightweight celebrity intent on raising taxes across the board.

"Life in the spotlight must be grand," a female announcer declares to paparazzi-like images of Obama and adoring chants in the background. "But for the rest of us, times are tough."

That advertisement and a Spanish-language ad and radio spot claim Obama voted to raise taxes on families earning just $42,000, a claim based on his vote for a nonbinding, Democratic budget resolution that allows all of President Bush's tax cuts to expire in 2011, something Obama has promised he would not let happen.

Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan called the ad "a lie" and "part of the old, tired politics of a party in Washington that has run out of ideas and run out of steam."

But McCain aides showed little concern for such niceties. "Like it would have crossed our minds to let up on the guy just because he's on vacation?" asked Charles R. Black Jr., one of McCain's top advisers, as McCain flew from Iowa to Arkansas yesterday.

The Republican National Committee mocked Obama with "Barack Obama's Hawaii Travel Guide," noting the elite prep school he attended on scholarship and highlighting a Chevron station selling gasoline for $4.78 a gallon.

Obama did counter by airing a radio advertisement in Ohio taking McCain to task over the fact that his campaign manager lobbied on behalf of a German freight-shipping company, DHL, that is laying off more than 8,000 Ohioans and moving its operations to Kentucky.

For all the media attention on McCain's ads, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe argued that the most important event of the campaign this week was McCain's trip to Ohio amid coverage of his and lobbyist-turned-campaign manager Rick Davis' role in helping DHL take over U.S.-based Airborne Express, and the subsequent loss of Ohio jobs.

"John McCain can now become an emblem for what's wrong with Washington," Plouffe said, noting that McCain cannot win the White House without Ohio.

During Obama's vacation week, his campaign will be focused on organizing in the 18 states his campaign has identified as battlegrounds, registering voters and focusing on local media.

"We have a game plan and a strategy, and we're going to continue to execute it. We're not going to be terribly worried about people playing armchair quarterback," Plouffe said. "By Nov. 4, there are character dimensions to John McCain that are going to be clear."

McCain starts his week in Pennsylvania, where he will stump across the state with its former governor and possible vice presidential choice Tom Ridge.

McCain's campaign confirmed that the senator will probably take his own vacation in the week before the Democratic National Convention. The senator plans to retreat to his home in Sedona, Ariz., where he owns a cabin and several other houses along a river.