NYT : McCain camp struggles to find strategy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/us/politics/04strategy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

July 4, 2008

Target: Barack Obama. Strategy: What Day Is It?

By PATRICK HEALY

Despite a three-month head start, Senator John McCain has struggled to solidify lines of attack against Senator Barack Obama for the general election, Republican operatives say and some of his own advisers acknowledge, running into problems that bedeviled Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary campaign against Mr. Obama.

The McCain camp faces the challenge of negatively defining an opponent who has a relatively short tenure in office and a thin record to dissect, unlike longer-serving senators like Mrs. Clinton or John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. McCain advisers also say they are wary of unleashing allies to attack Mr. Obama, given how some conservatives have overstepped and been criticized for racially tinged remarks.

Mr. McCain shook up the management of his campaign on Wednesday, in part because of concern within his organization and among Republicans generally about his difficulty in putting Mr. Obama on the defensive.

Like those unleashed by Mrs. Clinton’s team in the winter and spring, the McCain camp’s attacks on Mr. Obama have had a lurching quality for weeks now, several Republicans said in interviews. Some days Mr. McCain or his allies have gone after Mr. Obama’s relative youth and inexperience, other days they have criticized his shifting positions (on public campaign financing) or policy stands (on guns and gasoline prices) or even his and his wife’s patriotism.

On Thursday McCain aides and the Republican National Committee pounced on a comment by Mr. Obama that he would be willing to “refine” his long-held plan to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within his first 16 months in office. An exasperated-looking Mr. Obama held a second news conference Thursday to say that he was committed to the 16-month goal but that he would also follow advice regarding withdrawal from American commanders in Iraq.

“We think there is a developing pattern with Senator Obama where he is willing to reverse core positions, like on Iraq, and which show he is not a change agent but just a typical politician,” said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for Mr. McCain. “We’ve got a long time to go to make our case.”

Yet Mr. Obama, one month after securing the Democratic nomination, and his advisers have proved defter and more fleet-footed at counterpunching than Mr. Kerry or Vice President Al Gore in 2000, Republicans said. They noted that Mr. Obama was not cowed into apologizing for recent remarks by Gen. Wesley K. Clark that appeared dismissive of Mr. McCain’s war service. Mr. Obama has maintained steady leads over Mr. McCain in most national polls.

Several Republicans said in interviews that momentum and the terms of the political debate favored Mr. Obama right now — and, worse, that the McCain camp’s attacks had been scattershot and inconsistent despite his advantage of wrapping up the Republican nomination in March.

“A lot of us on the right are waiting for the quarterback to call the play, and we will take our lead from John McCain when he selects his approach against Obama,” said Nelson Warfield, a Republican consultant not affiliated with the McCain campaign.

McCain advisers say they have plenty of time — four months — to derail the Obama candidacy, yet acknowledged that running against a “movement candidate” — in the words of one McCain aide — had been challenging even for deft politicians like the Clintons.

These advisers said that they had been studying Mrs. Clinton’s approach and her failings, and that they were confident that general election voters would be more concerned with matters like experience than the Democratic primary electorate, which embraced Mr. Obama’s early opposition to the war in Iraq and his message of change. McCain aides said they would be increasingly zeroing in on the experience question and making rhetoric vs. reality attacks on his record and speeches — though they admitted that this, too, had proved insufficient for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. McCain has also sought to make an issue out of Mr. Obama’s refusal to meet him for weekly debates around the country — a bone that Mrs. Clinton picked with Mr. Obama before the Wisconsin primary in February, including in television advertisements she blanketed the state with. Mr. Obama won Wisconsin by 17 percentage points.

While the shake-up of Mr. McCain’s campaign strategy team on Wednesday was heartening to several Republicans, they also noted that President Bush’s re-election campaign had already settled on an effective argument against Mr. Kerry by late spring of 2004 — branding him daily as a flip-flopper and inauthentic. That months have passed without the McCain campaign similarly defining Mr. Obama somehow has frustrated Republicans more than, say, Mr. Obama’s strong fund-raising or Democratic Party unity.

Russ Schriefer, a Republican consultant who worked on the McCain media strategy until last summer, said the Bush campaign had set a standard for success by driving a consistent message that defined the issues in the 2004 debate on its terms.

“There are a number of issues that you can poll straight up to drive a wedge between McCain and Obama — tax questions, foreign policy, national security, homeland security questions — and I think a lot of these issues can separate these two candidates in Senator McCain’s favor,” said Mr. Schriefer, a Bush campaign veteran.

McCain aides said Mr. Obama’s comments about Iraq on Thursday provided perhaps their best opening yet to diminish his image. It came after weeks when they said they were struggling to portray Mr. Obama as a stereotypically two-faced politician who was willing to recalibrate his positions on Second Amendment rights (after a Supreme Court decision last month) and on public campaign financing (after he said he would pay for his fall campaign with private donations).

At the same time, they said they were trying to be careful about overreaching, noting that Mr. McCain has pledged to run a “respectful” campaign. They said Mr. McCain felt forced to distance himself from conservatives who sought to damage his opponent by using Mr. Obama’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama, or by running a commercial that played up his ties to his former pastor, who has been criticized as making racially inflammatory remarks.

Yet Obama aides and Democratic consultants said that, in reviewing the daily barrage of Republican attacks against Mr. Obama over the last month, they found no clear strategy akin to portraying Mr. Kerry as inconsistent or Mr. Gore as inauthentic and elitist.

“The Bush people were devastating against John Kerry because their line of attack was so focused and consistent,” said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic consultant not affiliated with the Obama campaign. “The key will be how Obama defines himself, responds to the questions voters have about his readiness and his character, and shows he deserves their trust, much more than any attacks McCain or his surrogates on the right make.”