For Obama, a taste of what long battle ahead will hold

In the last few days alone, Senator John McCain has mocked a statement Obama made about Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Tennessee Republican Party, identifying him with his middle name as Barack Hussein Obama, suggested that his foreign policy would be shaped by people who are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.

The Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wednesday invoking a questionnaire Obama filled out when running for Senate in 2004 to show that he once opposed cracking down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

Without using Obama’s name, President Bush, at a White House news conference on Thursday, assailed his willingness to meet Cuba’s new leader, Raul Castro, without preconditions, saying that to do so would grant “great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.”

For much of this year, Obama has been handled with relative care by Clinton and, before they dropped out, the other Democratic candidates. They generally do not have huge policy differences with him, and they have been wary of making a particularly harsh attack that winds up in a Republican television advertisement this fall.

Yet the shifting tone offers a glimpse of the Republican playbook as the party adapts to the prospect that it will be running against Obama rather than Clinton.

It is a reminder that should Obama win the nomination, he will be playing on a more treacherous political battleground as his opponents — scouring through his record of votes and statements and his experiences before he entered public life — look for ways to portray him as out of step with the nation’s values, challenge his appeal to independent voters and emphasise his lack of experience in foreign policy and national security.

Some of this will almost certainly take the shape of the Internet rumors and whispering campaigns that have popped up against Obama since he got into the race, like the false reports that he is Muslim.

But others will simply draw on Obama’s voting record and speeches, interviews and debate appearances. McCain’s aides said their first line of attack would be to portray him as a liberal, and they have already begun pointing to a rating in The National Journal, based on his votes, of Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. Though McCain has vowed repeatedly to wage a tough if respectful campaign — he chastised a conservative talk radio host this week for disparaging Obama and invoking his middle name — his aides have left no doubt that they will draw sharp distinctions with him on issues that Clinton has never been able to use. Foremost among them is Iraq.

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama, said tactics used effectively against Senator John Kerry in 2004 and Vice President Al Gore in 2000 would not work against Obama.

“They will try to rerun old races and battles and divide along traditional lines,” Axelrod said. “I think the country is eager for something else.”

Clinton has been arguing for months that she would be the stronger opponent against the Republicans than Obama because her record is already well known and his is not. This is part of the case Clinton has been making to Democratic superdelegates in the final stand of the campaign.

“He regularly goes out there and says he’s the person who can beat John McCain,” said Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist. “But the truth is, if he is ever in a general election, a lot of positions he took in 2003 and 2004 will come back to haunt him in a big way and a lot of the vetting that didn’t happen will happen. The independent and Republican support that he has had will evaporate really quickly.”