Economic message buoys Obama
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Senator Barack Obama entered this presidential race as the antiwar candidate, defined by his early and vocal opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion. He captured the left wing of the Democratic Party, particularly in Iowa, and rode that support to the nomination.
Almost two long years later, Obama enters the campaign's waning hours a strikingly different candidate, one who may win the presidency tomorrow largely on the strength of his economic message.
Among the many ways in which Obama has evolved as a candidate, none is as fundamental as his shift in focus from the war to the economy. The metamorphosis reflects both the changed political climate over the past 21 months, and the agility Obama has shown in responding to it.
"He crafted a message of change, broadly speaking, and he has been able to essentially fold almost anything underneath that concept," said Dan Palazzolo, a political scientist at the University of Richmond in Virginia. "He has very skillfully adapted to almost every contingency that has come up."
It is not that Obama has softened his opposition to the war - he still says forcefully he will end it if elected president and withdraw nearly all US combat troops within 16 months. But as the race with Republican John McCain matured - and as joblessness and home foreclosures crowded a less violent Iraq from newscasts and front pages - Obama de-emphasized the antiwar aspects of his message and stepped up his economic appeals.
The economy, though always a leading concern for voters, took on new urgency in the closing weeks as the Wall Street crisis shook the financial system.
Even Obama's message on the war has evolved to reflect the nearly exclusive focus on economy in the campaign's final chapter. The thrust of his war critique now is not the paralyzing violence, the political instability, or the deaths of American troops - all of which have ebbed. It is the money the United States is spending there, at a time when he says domestic needs are so great - millions without healthcare, unemployment on the rise, crumbling schools, roads, and bridges.
"It's time to stop spending $10 billion a month in Iraq when the Iraqi government sits on a huge surplus, and we're having deficits," he said to more than 60,000 gathered in front of the Ohio statehouse yesterday in Columbus. "As president I will end this war. I will ask the Iraqi government to step up for their future and we will finally finish the fight that we should have finished in the first place - we are going to go after [Osama] bin Laden, and Al Qaeda, those who killed 3,000 Americans."
Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, said any campaign would adjust its message over two years, but that Obama had progressed as far as he has by sticking to a consistent message of change - on the economy, on foreign policy, on the country's civic culture.
From the beginning, Axelrod said, Obama believed, even as Iraq was dominating headlines, that President Bush's economic policies were taking the country in the wrong direction. That core belief, he said, allowed the Illinois senator to move "seamlessly" to the largely economic platform of recent weeks.
"Even as we began this campaign, there was a real sense of economic unrest among middle-class people. We saw it. We heard it," Axelrod said in an interview. "So we always thought the economic policies of Bush would be part of what was on trial in this campaign. The thing we didn't anticipate is the degree to which . . . . McCain would embrace them."
Axelrod also asserted that all the unexpected twists and turns in the race had benefited Obama politically, allowing him to deflect the criticism early on that he was untested an unprepared to lead.
Of course, part of the reason Obama is not harping as much on Iraq is that country's security situation has improved markedly, partly through the greater cooperation of Sunni tribal leaders in quelling violence, but partly because of the successes of the troop surge that McCain championed and Bush implemented more than a year ago.
Obama opposed the surge, saying it would not bring long-term political stability. But he has struggled, as violence has decreased, to maintain his critique, and McCain and his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, have hammered him for refusing until recently to acknowledge its successes. Obama praises American troops for helping reduce the violence, but insists the surge has done little to answer the question of how the United States will end its military engagement.
When Obama waded into the presidential race in February 2007, the centerpiece of his campaign was his opposition to a war many of his most formidable expected opponents had supported. He often trumpeted an October 2002 speech against the war he delivered as a US Senate candidate, in which he blasted the impending invasion as "dumb" and "rash."
His presidential campaign saw great political promise in that speech but lacked good audio from the day, so aides had Obama re-record it for an Internet ad. (In the speech, Obama also decried Republican attempts "to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.")
Obama often pledged not just to end the war, but also the "mindset" he said led to it. It was a clear shot at his leading rivals, Senator Hillary Clinton and former senator John Edwards, who by then were expressing similar views on ending the war but had both voted to authorize it back in 2002.
"That gave him a tremendous head start going into Iowa, and then it was a given as long as he needed it: He was the antiwar candidate," said Dan Payne, a Boston-based Democratic strategist. "And then it started to sort of fade as an issue."
Now, Obama's emphasis on the mounting costs of Iraq fits neatly into his broader critique of the war, and some of his supporters say it only adds to their conviction that it is time for troops to come home.
"The war is a huge issue, but I think that's gone into the background because the economy is tanking," added Jane Landwehr, a 44-year-old from Columbus who works in commercial real estate and attended yesterday's rally. "And they're closely linked, because of all the money we're spending there."
In the West, voters have generally been focused on healthcare and jobs, so it's not a leap for them to now follow Obama onto domestic terrain, said Pat Waak, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party.
"Although there has been a very strong antiwar feeling in the West, and particularly in this state, it was never the number one all-encompassing issue for people," she said.
Waak argued that Obama's "flexibility" in being able to artfully pivot to the economy has served him well with voters.
"We're all surprised with how quickly Wall Street changed," she said. "None of us anticipated that."
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.
Correction: Because of an error by Reuters, a caption in yesterday's National report misidentified the location of an appearance by singer Bruce Springsteen with Barack Obama and his family. The event took place in Cleveland. 