Hardball is new for both candidates
McCain, Obama had been spared inter-party battle
ALBUQUERQUE - When he left St. Paul in the yawning hours of Friday morning, freshly crowned Republican nominee John McCain headed off to meet his opponent, Barack Obama, in a place neither had ever gone: a competitive partisan election.
Over a combined four decades in politics, McCain and Obama have each won and lost tough primary duels, in which they elevated small ideological distinctions into testaments to character. But neither has done what he must now do: carry his party's flag in a general election contest, where tactics tend not only to be fiercer but to exploit the polarization that both candidates appear to abhor.
"Primaries are like a scrimmage. Generals are like an away game," said Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a Virginia consultant who advised John Edwards's campaign this year. "The level of attacking is much higher in a general, because of the contrasting ideological differences."
Throughout the course of their careers, both candidates have used their freedom from a tough general election to fashion reputations as independent-minded politicians able to defy a party line when it suited them. They learned to build their own organizing and fund-raising networks because in contested primaries they could not count on a party's machinery. Yet now, both Obama and McCain are forced for the first time to define themselves in relation to the party letter next to their name.
"I see in both situations they're not nearly as close to a party as they might have needed to be," said Roy Fletcher, a deputy campaign manager for McCain's 2000 presidential race. "If anything, the party's carrying Obama and McCain's carrying himself."
Both nominees began their careers as newcomers trying to break into one-party turf, McCain in the Phoenix area and Obama on Chicago's South Side, each running as a charismatic outsider against local political veterans. Their biggest victories, McCain's first for Congress in 1982 and Obama's for the US Senate in 2004, came through differentiating themselves in multiple-candidate primary fields, not on ideology but personal appeal.
"He had the ability to get votes that were not like [those for] other Chicago Democrats," said Dick Simpson, a former alderman and chairman of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said of the state senator's triumph over four opponents. "That was mostly on the basis of his character."
Since their first elections, each candidate has faced difficulty only when waging insurgent campaigns against an establishment figure within his own party for higher office. Otherwise, election-year autumns have been an abnormally quiet time for each.
In 1992, facing a weak Democratic challenger, Claire Sargent, McCain took a long trip to Vietnam with Senator John F. Kerry as part of their efforts to negotiate a deal over the remains of those missing in action.
"He basically ran a campaign of ignoring the opposition," said Matt Barron, a Democratic opposition researcher who worked on behalf of Sargent. "He played it low-key. He didn't think he had to break a sweat."
Without a serious contest, the underfunded Democrats lost an opportunity to seriously contest McCain's record on land-use issues, his support for what Barron called "corporate welfare," and other controversial issues.
As a result, said Barron, national impressions began to form, largely unchallenged by local Democrats, that McCain, who faced even weaker opposition six years later, was more moderate than other Republicans on environmental and social issues.
During the same period, the leadership of the Arizona Republican Party moved aggressively to the right, especially on immigration. Yet in 2004, against another minor Democratic challenge, McCain maintained an open-ended centrist position on the issue, supporting a legalization plan that put him at odds with other Republican officeholders and candidates in the state.
Arizona political analysts say that McCain, able to avoid aggressively campaigning on a ticket with more controversial members of his party, carried two-thirds of Latino votes - a success frequently trumpeted by McCain backers when explaining how he can compete for that bloc nationally this year.
Obama emerged from his 2004 primary to face a well-funded Republican moderate, Jack Ryan. Within months, before ever fully engaging Obama, Ryan withdrew from the race amid a scandal, and Republicans never recruited a serious candidate in his place.
The general-election strategy to run against Obama that had been drafted by Ryan advisers was never implemented. Their opposition-research file focused on votes Obama had taken as a state legislator against school reforms and measures to permit more aggressive policing. In those areas, Ryan aides say, they would have used Obama's positions to paint him as a doctrinaire, big-city liberal unwilling to antagonize influential Democratic interest groups.
Ryan's replacement, Alan Keyes, a failed two-time presidential candidate and talk-show host who lived in Maryland, waged a campaign largely as farce. Obama spent much of the fall campaigning and fund-raising for other Democratic candidates around the country, helping to the lay the groundwork for a presidential run a little over two years later.
By then, Obama had succeeded at presenting himself nationally as a Democrat willing to question some of his party's traditional positions. For example, he defied teachers' unions when he suggested that he was open to merit-pay reforms, and was able to enter the presidential race with ambiguous positions on trade and the handling of the Iraq war.
Hans Noel, a Georgetown University political scientist, said both candidates' trajectories leave them facing steep learning curves.
"There's a definite balance you need as you talk to swing voters and at the same time talk to your base," he said. "That's a very subtle thing to do, and having experience playing in that place is probably going to matter." 