Personality emerges as tight race's pivot point

It's McCain's steady hand vs. Obama's trustworthiness

By Paul West | paul.west@baltsun.com

September 7, 2008

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama holds a slight advantage over John McCain going into the final phase of the 2008 campaign, which is shaping up more as a personality contest than a battle of ideas.

Both candidates are framing the choice for voters around a theme of change, but strategists - foreshadowing continued attacks by both campaigns and a heavy dose of negative ads - say that McCain's chances for winning may ultimately depend on his ability to stoke doubts about Obama's readiness for the presidency.

"There are more Democrats than Republicans in America today, and Obama would still be the favorite to win. But I would not be surprised if McCain upset him," said Merle Black, an Emory University political scientist.

Because Obama "is somebody who's really unknown in any great detail to most Americans," the presidential debates, which begin the week after next, may be unusually important in helping undecided voters make up their mind, he added. "And so, it's Obama's to lose."

With Election Day just over eight weeks away, the race is very competitive. The latest Gallup daily tracking poll, released yesterday, showed that a positive bounce for McCain out of last week's Republican convention had cut Obama's lead to two percentage points, 47-45, a statistical tie.

The candidates were dead even, 45-45, heading into the Democratic convention. Top advisers in both camps say a clear picture of the fall campaign won't emerge until post-convention polling is completed later this week.

In an unusual bipartisan gesture at the height of a hard-fought campaign, Obama and McCain issued a joint statement yesterday announcing that they would "put aside politics" and appear together Thursday to mark the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack at the site of the former World Trade Center in New York.

But that momentary truce isn't likely to change the tone of the campaign. Obama went after McCain again yesterday, in a speech via satellite to AARP, for "not offering much change."

At the same time, Obama has tried to inoculate himself against expected Republican attacks. He has repeatedly criticized a comment by McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, who said last week that the election "is not about issues" but instead is about the candidates' personalities - "their values, their character, their opinions, their principles."

At a Scranton, Pa., stop on Friday, Obama said, "When they say this isn't about issues, it's about personalities, what they're really saying is, 'We're going to try to scare people about Barack. So we're going to say that, you know, maybe he's got Muslim connections, or we're going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals, or he's not patriotic.'"

Davis, in a statement yesterday, called Obama's remark "a cynical attempt to play the victim" and an example of the old-style politics the Democrat claims to eschew.

"The McCain campaign understands that its candidate has a better chance of winning a contest over character than over issues," William Galston of the liberal Brookings Institution wrote in a post-convention analysis. McCain is presenting himself as "a safe choice for uncertain times."

"Obama's challenge," he added, "is to make Americans comfortable with the idea of him as president so that the forces underlying this year's contest come to the fore. ... It is a testament to McCain's personal appeal - and to the uncertainty Obama has not yet dispelled - that the race remains as close as it is."

Paul Wilson, a Republican media consultant and occasional adviser to the McCain camp, said the election "is getting framed as this massive personality battle. You would think it would be about the economy, and you would think the war would be in there some place, but so far they're not."

Obama strategists say that McCain's pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate was part of an effort to set up an argument over social values, and such hot-button topics as gay marriage and abortion. But they predicted that any attempt to revive the culture wars of past campaigns would be overwhelmed by economic worries in most voters' minds.

Republicans hope that Palin, a religious conservative with strong anti-abortion views, will help McCain attract more votes from the women and socially conservative Catholics he needs to defeat Obama.

Palin's initial impact on the election was described as "a wash" by Gary Langer of ABC News, in an analysis of a national opinion survey about McCain's vice presidential pick. Reactions to Palin broke heavily along the existing partisan divide, the poll found, and produced no immediate boost for McCain among women voters. Moderate independents, an important target for both campaigns, reacted more positively to Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, than to Palin, according to the survey.

Palin's emergence as a new Republican star has energized the religious and social conservatives who play important roles as campaign volunteers and might have remained on the sidelines. Mike DuHaime, the McCain campaign political director, said the number of volunteers had quadrupled last weekend, after Palin's selection was announced.

But Robert Gibbs, a senior Obama aide, said that "the jury is still out on how [Palin] plays in, say, a lot of suburban counties throughout the country, where, we think, swing voters will decide the election."

Strategists in both parties have privately expressed nervousness about the election, and most predicted that the outcome would remain in doubt until the campaign's final days.