Barack Obama

McCain tries negative campaign against Obama

31 juillet 2008 – 22:12

WASHINGTON: John McCain’s top aide and the Barack Obama campaign engaged in a bitter exchange Thursday over whether Obama had cynically raised the issue of race, culminating several days in which the McCain camp has started an all-out offensive aimed at defining Obama as negatively as possible in the eyes of the electorate.

The firestorm erupted after a week when Obama, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, had scored wide success on the international stage. But even as he returned from a seven-country tour and sought to shift the debate to economic ground, the McCain camp was charting a tough counteroffensive under the same people who led President George W. Bush’s successful re-election campaign in 2004.

“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” the camp of McCain, Obama’s presumed Republican foe in November, said Thursday in an e-mail message. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

That blunt comment, which thrust the question of race into the general-election campaign in its most direct way yet, came not from a junior aide but from Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager.

It followed Obama’s own remark, following a series of sharply critical ads from McCain, that Republicans were trying to frighten voters by attacking Obama as different-looking and “with a funny name.”

“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face,” Obama said Wednesday. “So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘He’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name.’ You know, ‘He doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”‘

Comparing his own appearance to that of presidents on U.S. currency - all white men - gave the McCain campaign a chance to say the man who would be the first nonwhite president was subtly alluding to racism.

But Robert Gibbs, an Obama spokesman, said Thursday that Obama was not referring to race.

“He was describing that he was new to the political scene,” The Associated Press reported him as saying. “He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

Obama’s comment was not, in fact, terribly different from things he had said earlier. He has joked that it was asking a lot of American voters to vote for a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama.

Still, his latest remark, made Wednesday in Missouri, opened the door for Davis’s blistering reply and seemed to thrust the campaign into unusually negative - and sensitive - territory for so early in a presidential campaign.

Some conservatives are questioning whether McCain, declaring himself an underdog and scrapping like one, might be going too far and thereby engender a backlash.

But other conservatives denounced the Obama comment.

“It’s clear he’s going to play the race card all the way to November, and maybe beyond,” Jay Nordlinger wrote in an online blog for National Review. “If you criticize him, you’re a racist, to one degree or another.”

McCain has not raised Obama’s race as an issue. But some conservative talk-show hosts have taken, for example, to referring repeatedly to “Barack Hussein Obama,” presumably underlining his father’s foreign roots and the fact that some of his ancestors were Muslim. He himself is a Christian.

McCain, after spending much of the summer searching for an effective line of attack, is now aggressively seeking to define Obama as arrogant, out of touch and unprepared for the presidency. In a concerted volley of television interviews, news releases and e-mail, McCain representatives are attacking Obama on a range of issues, part of the campaign’s most full-throttled effort to define Obama negatively.

The recent tough McCain language appeared to represent a bold gamble: drawing free publicity while lobbing political hand grenades as part of a more methodical approach to recast the election into a referendum on the still largely unknown Obama, as defined by McCain.

McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, who ran the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent in 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite and equivocal.

The attacks against Obama have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive to tarnish Kerry’s name, including the tactic of attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Thus, the latest ad portrays the huge crowds that turned out for Obama in Berlin not as a sign of his genuine appeal but as a reflection of celebrity-minded superficiality.

The latest political eruption seemed to follow a steady buildup of pressure.