Columbus, Ohio ? Barack Obama is playing it safe. Leading in polls with 25 days to Election Day, the Democratic nominee is offering careful proposals to address the economic crisis while letting allies respond to John McCain’s sharpest charges.

Obama now reads his speeches from teleprompters, reducing the chance of gaffes. He has not held a press conference in two weeks, although he has done several one-on-one interviews with national and local reporters.

He now refers to Republican John McCain as “my opponent” more often than by name. And he offers carefully limited, comparatively non-controversial remedies for the nation’s financial crisis.

Publicly, Obama’s aides say he keeps a calm demeanor and measured tone because he doesn’t want to fuel the anguish and panic caused by the economic meltdown. Privately, they acknowledge there is no desire to shake up a campaign dynamic that is inching him closer to the White House.

“I don’t like to yell,” Obama told more than 10,000 people in Columbus on Friday, his fifth large rally in hotly contested Ohio in two days. He was referring to a sound-system glitch, but it could have been a metaphor for his home-stretch strategy.

“He’s responding just right, and the polls are reflecting it,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who campaigned with Obama this week and helped lead the counterattacks against McCain. When GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin spoke in Ohio on Thursday, Brown said, she spent too much time on issues such as Obama’s ties to Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers, now a college professor in Chicago.

“People are saying, ‘What about our jobs, what about the banking situation?”‘ Brown said.

On Friday as McCain rolled out a new TV ad with his sharpest language yet about Ayers, the sharpest Democratic response came from Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, who told an audience in Springfield, Mo., that McCain is trying to “take the lowest road to the highest office in America.”

Obama is seeking a careful balance. He criticizes details of McCain’s chief economic proposals, and he briefly and broadly disputes Republican attacks on his character, not getting into details. That seems to satisfy Democratic stalwarts who think recent nominees were too slow to respond to character attacks.

Obama devotes more time to explaining his own long-standing proposals for tax cuts and energy investments. On Friday, he added a temporary program of tax breaks, low-interest government and government-backed private loans for small businesses having trouble borrowing to meet payrolls, maintain inventories or expand.