Obama takes the offensive vs. McCain

Democrat delivers attack on economic differences

Senator Barack Obama is kicking off his general election campaign in aggressive fashion, leveling daily, hard-hitting attacks on Republican John McCain designed to capitalize on the stark policy differences between them.

Forgoing a softer introduction to the broader electorate, Obama and his advisers have decided to go right at McCain, calculating that the candidates' major distinctions on issues such as tax relief, the war in Iraq, and diplomacy play to their favor. They see an opening with President Bush's low approval ratings, the public wanting a fresh foreign policy approach, and American families feeling increasingly squeezed by high gasoline and food prices.

The forceful tack is a departure from 2004, when Senator John F. Kerry, as he transitioned from the Democratic primary race to the fall campaign, sought to burnish his commander-in-chief credentials and downplay criticism of the president. It also serves notice to Democrats that Obama, despite vows to lead a new era of conciliatory politics, will not shy away from harsh critiques of McCain and his positions.

Obama, who spent much of the Democratic nomination race on the defensive, launched the latest broadside yesterday to kick off a two-and-a-half-week economic tour to highlight what he calls "very serious differences" with McCain to voters in potential battleground states such as North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

In a speech in Raleigh, N.C., Obama invoked McCain's name nearly 20 times as he sought to portray the Arizona senator as the heir to Bush's economic policies. Rhetorically, Obama's strategy could be summed up by Ronald Reagan's memorable question for voters in 1980: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

"For all his talk about independence, the centerpiece of John McCain's economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush's policies," Obama said. "We've got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history, and now John McCain wants to give us another."

Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, said on a conference call with reporters organized by McCain's campaign that he was surprised that Obama, having just secured the Democratic nomination, is going after McCain so strongly.

"I think that probably 50 percent of Senator Obama's speech was targeted at discrediting Senator McCain," Burr said of yesterday's economic address.

Though Obama used his speech to highlight prior proposals to boost the slumping economy - including a $50 billion plan to help laid-off workers and states facing massive budget shortfalls, a new mortgage interest tax credit, and a middle-class tax cut - his true objective seemed to be attacking McCain's own plans.

With average gas prices topping $4 a gallon for the first time, the jump in unemployment the highest in two decades, and a majority of Americans rating economic conditions "poor," Obama accused McCain of failing to offer a meaningful plan to ease the lending crisis, gearing his healthcare proposal to the "healthy and the wealthy," and advocating individual and corporate tax rate cuts that Obama charged would add $5.7 trillion to the national debt.

McCain and his campaign agree that their differences with Obama are wide, but they say that is because the Illinois senator's prescriptions are wrong for the country.

"Senator Obama says that I'm running for Bush's third term. It seems to me that he's running for Jimmy Carter's second," McCain said with a grin in an interview with NBC News last night.

Asked what he meant, McCain replied, "Because spend, spend, tax, spend."

Indeed, Republicans are trying to paint Obama - who has proposed eliminating Bush's tax cuts for those making $200,000 or more a year, possibly raising the cap on Social Security taxes, and boosting the capital gains rate - as a tax-and-spend liberal. McCain's chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Obama's contention that all his new proposals would be paid for was impossible to prove without a fuller accounting from his campaign.

"It's an assertion without a foundation, to my knowledge," Holtz-Eakin said.

Holtz-Eakin also took issue with Obama's assertion that McCain's plan to reduce the corporate tax rate would award ExxonMobil $1.2 billion, despite the oil giant's record profits. Obama, Holtz-Eakin noted, voted for the Bush administration's 2005 energy bill, while McCain voted against it. Critics, including former Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, attacked the legislation as a giveaway to Big Oil.

The back-and-forth on the economy continued into yesterday afternoon, after McCain reiterated to donors in Virginia his proposal for a holiday on the gas tax. "Talk to somebody that owns a couple of trucks and ask them if they'd like to have a relief from 18 1/2 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24 1/2 cents a gallon for diesel," he said.

Hours later, Obama's campaign hit back with an analysis from the American Road and Transportation Builders Association saying that a suspension of the gas tax would cost Virginia $188 million for road and bridge projects. (The association's members earn a living on such projects.)

But the economy is just one of many issues that Obama has seized on in the past few weeks in trying to cast McCain as the wrong choice in November.

Obama and his campaign have been unsparing in criticizing McCain's strong support for the war in Iraq, and Obama pounced last month when McCain asserted erroneously that US troop levels had fallen beneath the number in the country prior to last year's military buildup.

Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist who helped run Kerry's 2004 campaign, said Obama's aggressiveness is meant to send two signals: that the general election has begun in earnest, and that, "I'm going to fight on all fronts."

Elmendorf said that another benefit of Obama's long, attention-grabbing primary race against Clinton was that it toughened him up for the fall campaign and taught him the risks of sitting back and letting an opponent define him.

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.