Obama, McCain go on the attack

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — If the last week is an indication, the White House fight between Barack Obama and John McCain won’t be the genteel, high-brow contest each promised earlier.

Obama is portraying the Republican as a George W. Bush clone who offers endless war and economic stagnation.

McCain — borrowing from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s playbook, just as some Democrats feared he would — hammered the theme of experience, figuring his extra decades on the national stage will give him more traction than Clinton got with that line of attack.

These early salvos could foreshadow a testy summer as the candidates try to soften up and define each other. At the least, it reflected the imperative to deny the other guy a free ride in the campaign’s warm-up stage.

The vitriol peaked when Obama criticized McCain’s opposition to expanding education benefits for veterans. “I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in opposition to this GI bill. I can’t believe why he believes it is too generous to our veterans,” the Democrat said on the Senate floor.

From California, the Republican — a former Navy pilot and prisoner of war — called it a “cheap shot.” He and other critics worried that the new veterans benefit would be so generous, it would hurt re-enlistment rates. And McCain rejected a lecture from someone “who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform” — his first jab about Obama’s lack of military service, underscoring a key contrast that he’s sure to exploit in coming months.

Obama hit back in unusually sharp terms. “These endless diatribes and schoolyard taunts from the McCain campaign do nothing to advance the debate about what matters to the American people,” he said.

Despite huge losses this month in West Virginia and Kentucky, Obama is edging close to locking up his nomination. That has emboldened him to look past Clinton, and keep his focus on McCain.

One goal was to chip away at the Republican’s long-cultivated image as a reformer, even as McCain began enforcing a strict no-lobbyist policy in his campaign.