WASHINGTON, DC: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama holds strong leads over his Republican adversary John McCain in two national polls released Tuesday.

A New York Times/CBS News poll had Obama ahead of McCain by 14 points--53 to 39 percent--while a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows Obama ahead by nine points, 50 to 41 percent.

Both polls were carried out among likely US voters and released on the eve of the final Obama-McCain debate, with exactly three weeks before the November 4 election.

The results of the LAT/Bloomberg poll showed Obama broadening of his lead from a September survey that showed him ahead 49-45, while the new results for the NYT/CBS News poll are substantially better than his three-point lead Obama had in a poll taken just before the October 7 Obama-McCain debate.

The NYT/CBS poll also shows that McCain's sharp attacks on Obama seem to have backfired: 21 percent of those surveyed said that their opinion of McCain has dropped in the last weeks, and the top two reasons cited were the McCain attacks on Obama and his choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Obama is also ahead of McCain by 16 points when asked who has the right "personality and temperament" to be president, with 69 percent for Obama and 53 percent for McCain.

McCain is also hurt by his ties to the unpopular Republican president, George W. Bush, who had a mere 24 percent approval rating in the survey.

"With more than four out of five of each candidate's supporters now saying their minds are made up, the poll suggests that McCain faces serious challenges as he looks to close the gap on his Democratic rival in the final three weeks of the campaign," CBS News said.

The LAT/Bloomberg poll said that just 10 percent of Americans believed that the country was headed in the right direction--the lowest percentage since the poll began asking the question in 1991.

The LAT/Bloomberg poll was conducted October 10-13 and included results from 1,543 people, and the poll's margin of error was plus or minus three points.

And the NYT/CBS News poll, also conducted October 10-13, was carried out among 1,070 adults nationwide, including 972 registered voters and has a plus or minus three percentage point margin of error. (AFP)