John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton released dueling advertisements on Wednesday that highlighted how the housing crisis has come to dominate the presidential race, with Clinton using a version of her red-phone commercial to question McCain’s ability to handle the souring economy.

In the advertisement, the Clinton campaign again portrays a family asleep in the middle of the night when the phone rings, meant to evoke a national crisis. The narrator then intones, “John McCain just said the government shouldn’t take any real action in the housing crisis; he’d let the phone keep ringing.”

Within hours, the McCain campaign released an advertisement on the Internet. It starts with images of the Clinton advertisement, with the narrator then commenting, “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama just said they’d solve the problem by raising your taxes — more money out of your pockets.”

The advertisements highlighted how the two parties’ candidates have developed starkly different approaches to the housing meltdown, with Obama and Clinton calling for billions of dollars in aid for distressed homeowners and McCain warning against costly federal intervention.

McCain’s rapid response recalled a similar advertisement by the Obama campaign in response to Clinton’s original red-phone advertisement, which questioned Obama’s readiness to be president.

The advertisements on Wednesday capped a day in which McCain gave speeches at old haunts, from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to the Florida base here where he learned to fly, and revealed that he had begun drawing up a list of roughly a score of potential running mates.

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