McCain, Palin pound away at Biden's crisis remark

Candidate says he has already 'been tested'

John McCain held a rally in Bensalem, Pa., yesterday, one of his campaign's many stops on a tour of swing states. At his stop in Harrisburg, McCain told supporters, ''America will not have a president who needs to be tested. I've been tested.'' (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

John McCain and Sarah Palin sharpened their attack yesterday on Barack Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief, using his running mate's prediction that Obama would be tested by an international crisis early in his presidency.

McCain noted that Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden had compared Obama to John F. Kennedy, who presided over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, then the Cuban missile crisis early in his term.

McCain said he was in his cockpit on the deck of the USS Enterprise in the waters off Cuba during the 1962 crisis.

"You know how close we came to a nuclear war?" he told supporters in Harrisburg, Pa. "America will not have a president who needs to be tested. I've been tested."

Trying to get voters to focus again on his foreign policy and national security experience, McCain is doing his best to capitalize on the remarks Biden made Sunday night in Seattle to campaign donors about Obama.

"Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. . . . I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. And he's gonna need help," Biden said, though he added that anyone who tests Obama will discover he has "a spine of steel."

Yesterday in Reno, Nev., Palin told supporters, "I guess we gotta say, 'Well, thanks for the warning, Joe.' " She then imagined the "crisis scenarios," based on what she described as Obama's foreign policy agenda: his pledge to meet with rogue leaders without preconditions, though he has amended that vow; and Obama saying he would go into the tribal areas of Pakistan to go after Osama bin Laden if the Pakistani government wouldn't, though Palin has supported a similar policy.

"Crisis scenario number three," she said, is that Obama's plan for withdrawing US combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office would leave "some 25 million Iraqis at the mercy of Iranian-supported Shi'ite extremists and Al Qaeda in Iraq" and could force US troops to return.

Palin asserted that after the Russian invasion of Georgia in August, "Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence," which could encourage Russia to invade Ukraine next. "That would be crisis scenario number four," she said.

"But I guess the looming crisis that most worries the Obama campaign right now is Joe Biden's next speaking engagement. Let's call that crisis number five," Palin said as supporters laughed uproariously.

Palin then reminded the crowd that during the Democratic primary campaign in August 2007, Biden said Obama wasn't ready to be president - though he has obviously changed his mind about that - and had praised McCain.

"And here we have some common ground," she said. "I want a president who spent 22 years in uniform defending our country, always putting his country first, fighting for you.. . . I want a president with the experience and the judgment and the wisdom and the truthfulness to meet the next international crisis - or better yet to avoid it."

The Obama campaign says that McCain and Palin are taking Biden's remarks about an international crisis out of context, and he was only stating the obvious anyway.

"What Senator Biden was saying and what is obvious to the American people, and the reason why Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama, is because American presidents are tested. That is a statement of fact," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said on MSNBC.