McCain tries 'check, balance'

Raises specter of 'monopoly'

ST. CHARLES, Mo. - As the race enters its final two weeks, John McCain's advisers say the campaign has settled on a closing appeal that targets Congressional Democrats as much as Barack Obama: Keeping a Republican in the White House is the best way to stop the Democrats from dominating the legislative agenda.

In making the case, Republicans acknowledge, McCain is caught in a bind. The argument that they think may best resonate with independents is the one that calls upon them to make an issue out of a party label McCain has worked elsewhere to shrug off.

"That argument is a bank shot," said McCain strategist Charlie Black. "We're reminding them that by considering Obama they're delivering a monopoly to liberal Democrats."

Yesterday, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham introduced McCain at a rally in this St. Louis suburb as "the best check and balance you can find to tell Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi not to raise your taxes and grow the government." Over the last week, McCain has regularly declared that Obama is "planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, and concede defeat in Iraq."

Advisers say that McCain will begin marketing divided government more directly in coming days as part of a summation targeted at undecided independents, whom Graham expects will break "three-to-one" against the race's "virtual incumbent," as he describes Obama. "It's an argument that works in the last four or five days," said Black.

The case for "checks and balances" gives urgency to McCain's new focus on the differences between his tax proposals and Obama's, Graham said in an interview. "McCain has been a check on his own party," he said. "He'll be a check on the Congress."

The appeal aligns with much of McCain's recent advertising, which - because it is sponsored by the Republican National Committee and not the campaign itself - has had an unusually partisan thrust given the political terrain. Many of the ads have conjoined, often awkwardly, criticism of Democratic legislators to attacks on Obama's character.

"When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers. When discovered, he lied. Obama: blind ambition, bad judgment," one television spot declares, before shifting subjects without pause or transition. "Congressional liberals fought for risky subprime loans. Congressional liberals fought against more regulation. Then, the housing market collapsed, costing you billions. In crisis, we need leadership, not bad judgment."

Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, running for a Senate seat, said the electorate is prepared to approach the ballot tactically. "Voters are very aware of the possibility of there being an Obama presidency, a majority in the House of Representatives, and 6o votes in the US Senate, with no check of any kind," Gilmore said. "They don't want to see a runaway government."

Introducing a partisan edge in the race's closing days carries risks for McCain. Strategists note that polls of voters all year have declared greater faith in Democrats than Republicans, and that campaigning against "congressional liberals" goes against the very forces that have made expanded Democratic control of both chambers a near certainty weeks before Election Day.

"Why are all these seats becoming vulnerable? They're becoming vulnerable because the Republican brand is tarnished," said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic media consultant working for congressional candidates in Colorado, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. "What's fundamentally an anti-Democratic argument is going to fall flat."