WASHINGTON - John McCain's first broadside against Barack Obama, as a bearer of only "rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas," was grounded in a familiar critique: the idealist driven by ego and elevated by media coverage into a messenger for a purer brand of politics.
In his first presidential race eight years ago, opponents pinned that caricature on McCain. This week, he used it on Obama.
"He has run entirely on his persona being different. It's important that we puncture that myth," Mark Salter, McCain's chief speechwriter, said of Obama. "What we've got to get people to see is one guy is real and one guy is just a promise."
McCain has repeatedly pledged that he would have a "respectful debate" with Hillary Clinton, who, McCain advisers say, is little different from Obama on matters of policy.
But on Tuesday, McCain's attention turned toward Obama, who has shown in the primaries a McCain-like ability to reach out to independent voters on the basis of his personal qualities. Without once naming Obama, McCain outlined distinctions with his rival in deeply personal, self-reflective language - dismissing Obama as an immature version of himself.
"When I was a young man, I thought glory was the highest ambition, and that all glory was self-glory," McCain said in his speech Tuesday night after winning three mid-Atlantic primaries. "I discovered that nothing is more liberating in life than to fight for a cause that encompasses you, but is not defined by your existence alone."
In 2000, McCain frequently exhorted his audiences to serve "a cause greater than yourself," but downplayed the theme this year. Now, according to adviser Steve Schmidt, McCain intends to revive the theme for the general election. In Tuesday's speech, he suggested that Obama's candidacy is propelled by self-interest instead of duty.
"I do not seek the presidency on the presumption that I am blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save my country in its hour of need," McCain said.
McCain advisers said this week that they intend to challenge Obama to abide by a pledge the two campaigns apparently made last spring to comply with federal spending limits if both reached the general election, casting it as a measure of his honor and devotion to reformist principles. "Breaking a public commitment in a campaign is no different than lying to your country," said Salter.
Salter said that Obama's candidacy is grounded in a "messianic complex" and that the press has treated him as "god-like." "Obama's message," according to Salter, "is 'I am something extraordinary - gaze upon me and everyone will be great. By the mere fact of electing me, we will have transformed the stale politics of the United States.' "
Obama's campaign yesterday turned the charge back on McCain, saying he has failed to live up to his reputation as a government reformer. "For many years, John McCain was also a leader on increasing transparency and accountability in government, but it looks like the wheels on the Straight Talk Express came off somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination," said campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
Salter said McCain's targeting of Obama was a response to recent Obama attacks on "Bush-McCain Republicans" and on McCain specifically for saying that American troops may be in Iraq for 100 years. In addition, Salter said, the campaign was provoked by a Los Angeles comedy troupe's release of an online video that mocks a McCain statement that he wouldn't be "concerned" if the US presence lasted 10,000 years.
McCain acknowledged at a press conference on Wednesday that he was referring to Obama in his primary-night remarks. "I've not observed every speech he's given, obviously, but they are singularly lacking in specifics," McCain said.
McCain's speech ridiculed Obama's rhetoric. McCain dismissed the "promise of hope" as a "platitude." He also promised that his own campaign would focus on "the dreams we all dream for our children" - a twist on Obama's book "Dreams From My Father" - and jokingly invoked Obama's slogan "Fired up, ready to go!"
In 2000, McCain ran as an optimistic maverick who would lead a "McCain majority" to override partisan politics and cleanse Washington. After McCain beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire, Bush portrayed McCain as a quixotic crusader and reinvented himself as a "reformer with results."
McCain "has had a lot of empty, stirring platitudes over the years and he's been successful with them," said Matt Welch, author of "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick," a critical biography. "People are responding to that and they're responding to it in Obama, too, and it's the height of irony that he's criticizing Obama for running on empty platitudes."
Clinton has similarly accused Obama of choosing uplift over specificity. Yesterday in Youngstown, Ohio, she described the difference between their two candidacies as "speeches versus solutions, talk versus action" and even seemed to accuse him of narcissism. "This is not about me, this is about you," Clinton told voters.
When McCain charged Obama with vainglory, however, he did so in self-referential terms, echoing advice McCain gave in a series of 2006 commencement speeches. "When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew," McCain said then.
"It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people," McCain went on. "I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights."
In his first memoir, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain wrote that it was his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam that focused him on the duty and honor of public service and gave his life meaning. When McCain first ran for Congress in 1982, he was rejected by opponents as a carpetbagging dilettante trying to leverage his celebrity as "a name Arizonans are talking about," as one of McCain's ads put it then.
"McCain's argument is, 'You're talking about change, but have you been tested?' " said John Karaagac, a lecturer at Indiana University and the author of an autobiographical essay on McCain. "He has been faced with that charge and he answered it. Now he's going to make sure Obama has the charge leveled at him."
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