For Obama, a Taste of What a Long Battle Would Hold Damon Winter/The New York Times
Barack Obama would face heavy attacks as the Democratic presidential nominee. He spoke Thursday at a rally in Austin, Tex.
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: February 29, 2008
WASHINGTON — When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton goes after Senator Barack Obama these days, she presses him on the details of his health care plan, criticizes the wording of his campaign mailings and likens his promise of change to celestial choirs.
Gerald Herbert/Associated Press
John McCain, whose chief line of attack promises to be on national security, at a campaign stop on Thursday in Richardson, Tex.
But if Mr. Obama becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, he is sure to face an onslaught from Republicans and their allies that will be very different in tone and intensity from what he has faced so far.
In the last few days alone, Senator John McCain has mocked a statement Mr. Obama made about Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Tennessee Republican Party, identifying him with his middle name as Barack Hussein Obama, suggested that his foreign policy would be shaped by people who are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.
The Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wednesday invoking a questionnaire Mr. Obama filled out when running for Senate in 2004 to show that he once opposed cracking down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants.
Without using Mr. Obama’s name, President Bush, at a White House news conference on Thursday, assailed his willingness to meet Cuba’s new leader, Raúl Castro, without preconditions, saying that to do so would grant “great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.”
For much of this year, Mr. Obama has been handled with relative care by Mrs. Clinton and, before they dropped out, the other Democratic candidates. They generally do not have huge policy differences with him, and they have been wary of making a particularly harsh attack that winds up in a Republican television advertisement this fall.
Yet the shifting tone offers a glimpse of the Republican playbook as the party adapts to the prospect that it will be running against Mr. Obama rather than Mrs. Clinton.
It is a reminder that should Mr. Obama win the nomination, he will be playing on a more treacherous political battleground as his opponents — scouring through his record of votes and statements and his experiences before he entered public life — look for ways to portray him as out of step with the nation’s values, challenge his appeal to independent voters and emphasize his lack of experience in foreign policy and national security.
Some of this will almost certainly take the shape of the Internet rumors and whispering campaigns that have popped up against Mr. Obama since he got into the race, like the false reports that he is Muslim. Others will no doubt come from the types of shadowy independent committees that have played a big role in campaigns in recent years.
But others will simply draw on Mr. Obama’s voting record and speeches, interviews and debate appearances. Mr. McCain’s aides said their first line of attack would be to portray him as a liberal, and they have already begun pointing to a rating in The National Journal, based on his votes, of Mr. Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate.
Though Mr. McCain has vowed repeatedly to wage a tough if respectful campaign — he chastised a conservative talk radio host this week for disparaging Mr. Obama and invoking his middle name — his aides have left no doubt that they will draw sharp distinctions with him on issues that Mrs. Clinton has never been able to use. Foremost among them is Iraq.
“Her fundamental problem is, in a Democratic primary, she can’t make an issue contrast against him,” said Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain. “On the Republican side, we’ll have a very significant issue contrast against him. When you look at issues — taxes, spending, judges, health care and national security — there is a divide as deep and wide on those issues as the Grand Canyon.”
Mr. Obama’s record is not as long as Mrs. Clinton’s, or as potentially rich, for an opponent looking for damaging votes or quotes. But there is still plenty to work with. Some cases are simple let’s-go-to-the-video moments, like Mr. Obama’s statements that he would support giving drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens or would support raising taxes to shore up Social Security, lines of attacks that Republicans are already employing.
Others — like a suggestion that Mr. Obama opposed the USA Patriot Act or supported a ban on handguns — might be subject to dispute by Mr. Obama, who would argue they were yanked out of context or did not take into account the subtleties of shaping legislation. (Nuance is usually a weak defense in political campaigns.)
Should Mr. Obama win the nomination, his candidacy could well be a test of whether these tactics still work or whether, used against a candidate who is trying to cultivate an appeal that transcends policy specifics, would fall flat this time. The fact that Mr. McCain felt compelled to rebuke some critics of Mr. Obama over the past few days suggests he might see a danger in attacking too aggressively.