How the GOP would attack Obama

From Salon.

What is fair game in the eyes of Wadhams, the Republican National Committee and McCain's own advisors, however, is asking whether Obama has the experience necessary to be president. The GOP will hammer away at Obama for his short tenure in the Senate, reminding voters that only four years ago he was in the Illinois Legislature while McCain was in his 21st year in Congress. The fact that Clinton managed to revive her campaign with a similar attack ahead of the Ohio and Texas primaries only proved to Republicans that it works.

Obama cruised through his 2004 Senate campaign without serious opposition in the general election, and Republicans say they don't think he has proved he can stand up to close scrutiny. "I don't care how big his rallies are and how eloquent and how hip he is, at some point he's going to have to go through the grinder, and I don't think anybody has any idea that he can do it," said Mark Salter, a close McCain advisor. Republican strategists think voters don't yet have a clear image in their minds of who Obama is -- and they're eager to help draw the picture for them. Only 19 percent of voters the RNC polled in January said they were "very familiar" with Obama's positions on issues.

"He does very well in an auditorium with 15,000 screaming liberal sycophants," Wadhams declared, "but whenever he's interviewed on a tough subject or following a defeat by Senator Clinton in some primary or caucus, I don't think he does very well." . . .

Republicans' best chance to counter Obama's appeal to voters may come when gifts like Wright's incendiary rhetoric surface. Following a report on "Good Morning America" about Wright's past sermons, the reverend's comments became a fixture on Rush Limbaugh's show and on "Hannity & Colmes." Polling already shows Wright's most inflammatory remarks offend a lot of voters. Just imagine if Wright showed up again in an ad on television in October. "Those film clips are pretty devastating," Wadhams said with some relish. And Limbaugh, naturally, has already gone ballistic. "No country wants a president who is a member of a church with this kind of radicalism as its mainstream," he fumed on Monday. . . .

"Instead of distancing himself and moving past this moment, he sort of owns it now," Republican strategist Kevin Madden argued after Obama's speech. (Madden worked for Mitt Romney's campaign, which went through equally thorny contortions over religion.) "Barack Obama, before all this, was at a point where his appeal transcended race. He was somebody that voters -- white and black both -- looked at as a candidate not viewed through the prism of white or black. [Now] he has become that." . . .

But it's one thing to know what's coming and to condemn it. It's another to beat it back. Hillary Clinton has insisted all through the campaign that her own battles with the GOP in the 1990s taught her how to survive -- even thrive on -- nasty attacks. For Obama to secure the Democratic nomination, he may have to persuade party insiders that he can do the same thing.