Clash over 'change' heats up

Obama sharpens his attack on McCain, assails 'fabricated' ads

Senator Barack Obama talked about tax relief and middle class tax cuts while at the McConnell Center in Dover, N.H. The Democratic presidential nominee launched a broad assault on John McCain's reformer credentials. (Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)

DOVER, N.H. - Senator Barack Obama, buffeted by an energized and newly aggressive Republican ticket, sought to reclaim the mantle of change yesterday, launching a broad assault on John McCain's reformer credentials and drawing contrasts with his rival in his starkest terms yet.

Confronting a dip in national polls and a public and media fixation with McCain's running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, Obama said he trusted American voters to sift through what he called the "nonsense" and "noise" of the political horse race.

Obama said that he is the candidate who will create jobs, shift the tax burden off the middle class, and bring universal access to healthcare, and that McCain, after nearly three decades in Washington and with his close ties to President Bush, is no agent of change.

"I mean, how does someone plausibly argue that they're going to bring about change when their policies are identical to what we've seen over the last eight years?" Obama said last night at a rally at New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord. "They must think the American people are stupid."

"He's been running in that herd for 26 years," Obama told a a few hundred voters inside a gym in downtown Dover. "It's just not realistic."

The arguments Obama made yesterday - that McCain is just like Bush, that he is out of touch with American families, and that he cannot hope to take on special interests when his campaign is run by Washington lobbyists - are ones he has articulated before. But he delivered them with fresh vigor, eager to turn the campaign conversation back to issues, where polls show he draws more support than McCain.

Obama acknowledged nervousness among some supporters that Republicans, with their increasingly strong attacks, were damaging him.

"You have ads that are just fabricated; they're just made up," Obama told a few hundred voters inside a gym in downtown Dover earlier yesterday.

"Lies!" someone yelled.

"Lies - that's the word I was looking for," Obama said.

But while he vowed he would not just "sit back and watch," he said he would resist running a harder-edged campaign.

"I just have a different philosophy, and that is, I'm going to respond with the truth," he said. "I'm not going to start making up lies about John McCain . . . . I am not going to be distracted or dissuaded from making my case to the American people."

Some Obama supporters said they appreciated his unwillingness to, in their view, play dirty.

"I really don't want to vote for someone I can't respect," said Jon Gould, a 19-year-old from North Hampton, N.H who's taking a year off from college to volunteer for Obama's campaign. "I'm not going to vote if he stoops to that level."

Obama's campaign yesterday reinforced its message of change through several channels - in a scathing memo to reporters from campaign manager David Plouffe, in fresh talking points for Obama's surrogates, and in new TV ads that will run nationally and in key states, including one that opens with footage of McCain when he first arrived in Congress, in 1982.

"Things have changed in the last 26 years. But McCain hasn't," the ad's narrator says. "He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an e-mail."

Republicans continued to fire back throughout the day.

"What is becoming clear to the American people is the fact that Barack Obama has no record of bipartisan legislative accomplishment, no history of bucking his party, and no chance of bringing change," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, asserting that Obama's message is "nothing more than an empty campaign slogan."

The Dover event was the latest in a series of intimate town hall-style meetings with voters that Obama has held in battleground states since accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention. It is a striking departure from the huge rallies the Illinois senator used to host several times a day. (He is scheduled to hold one of those big rallies this morning at a park in downtown Manchester.)

Obama said in Dover yesterday that he welcomed a debate with McCain about who is more likely to bring change to Washington, and he made a "firm pledge" that, if elected, no family making less than $250,000 a year would see an increase in their taxes, including payroll, income, and capital gains.

"Who is best quipped to lead us into that future? Who is offering concrete ideas to address the big challenges that we face?" Obama asked. "If the people focus on that, if that becomes the central question of this campaign, then we will win. All the distractions won't matter. All the nonsense won't matter."

Obama seized on a comment McCain made Thursday at a Columbia University forum on public service, in which McCain said that, as a senator, he was somewhat "divorced" from the challenges facing American families.

"Maybe they don't see what's taking place," Obama said. "Maybe they're out of touch. But I do see what's going on and so do you, all across America."

McCain's campaign immediately responded by accusing Obama of distorting McCain's words. "It's a shame that Barack Obama is using a discussion of service on Sept. 11 as the basis for a distorted political attack," Bounds said in a statement, noting that Obama, at the same event, said that while small-town mayors have to fix potholes and ensure the garbage is picked up, "We yak in the Senate."

Obama yesterday repeatedly tried to tie McCain to the current state of the economy, saying at one point, "They have run this economy into the ditch." Reprising an old Ronald Reagan zinger, he said, "If you are better off than you were eight years ago. . . . John McCain is your man." And he mocked McCain's vow to tell special interests that their days of running Washington were over.

"Here's the only problem," Obama said. "His campaign's run by some of biggest lobbyists in Washington. Who's he going to tell, his campaign manager? His campaign chairman? That's not change."

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