With time running out, McCain looks for right message

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By JIM TANKERSLEY and CHRISTI PARSONS / Chicago Tribune

PITTSBURGH — Carolyne Morrison has a dilemma. She’s a little worried about Democrat Barack Obama’s personal background, but she thinks his policies might actually improve the economy.

“It’s all about the money for me now,” she says, “and I can’t stop thinking about that.”

John McCain has a dilemma, too, here and in battlegrounds across the country. He needs voters like Morrison to close a widening gap with Democratic rival Barack Obama. But how can he woo them?

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McCain’s answer this week appears to be this: by attacking Obama’s character and associations. But here in Pennsylvania — and in a string of traditionally red states where the Republican nominee is struggling and can’t afford to lose — polls and interviews suggest McCain needs a sharper economic message to keep his White House hopes alive.

Pennsylvania may be McCain’s best remaining opportunity to grab a big state that Democrat John Kerry won in 2004, but it also may be slipping away. Daily tracking polls from Muhlenberg College and the Morning Call newspaper show Obama has widened his lead here from four points to 12 over the last two weeks, powered by middle-class voters who are almost exclusively focused on the economy.

About 10 percent of poll respondents haven’t decided on a candidate yet, including many with household incomes between $40,000 and $60,000. Christopher Borick, who directs Muhlenberg’s Institute of Public Opinion, says many of those undecideds remain unimpressed with either contender’s handling of the recent financial crisis, perhaps leaving an opening for the right McCain message.

“It’s got to be about the economy,” Borick says. “It’s that big of an issue, and that overpowering right now, that it squeezes everything else out of the way.”

Pollsters say the same is true in such states as Florida, Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina, which have largely backed Republican presidential candidates in the last half-century. Obama is leading or close in all of them, polls show, thanks in many cases to gains among men and independents.

McCain’s campaign said this week it hopes to “turn the page” on the financial crisis. But if McCain hopes to rally, “He can’t change the subject,” says Matt Towery, chief executive of the political polling and media firm Insider Advantage.

“To me, the silliest concept in the world is going in, when you’re losing state by state, and starting to play this game of ’he’s hanging out with terrorists,’ “ Towery says. “This is not the age of Willie Horton.”

It has been two decades since the Michael Dukakis campaign got bogged down by pro-GOP ads featuring Horton. Dukakis was the Democratic governor of Massachusetts when Horton committed robbery and rape while on a furlough from a state prison. Fresher in memory is the experience of 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry, damaged by attacks on his wartime military service by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

But neither the Horton ads nor the Swift Boat attacks had to win over voters petrified about their financial future in the midst of an economic meltdown.

Down the street from Carolyne Morrison in Pittsburgh, her neighbor John Gombita remembers the Swift Boat attacks, and they infuriate him. Gombita is a gun owner, a military veteran and an undecided voter. He says he might hold it against McCain if he talks too much about the personal and not about “the issues.”

He’s heard the latest from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, reminding voters of some of Obama’s associations. Obama was once friendly with Bill Ayers, a 1960s radical involved in Vietnam-era anti-war bombings in the U.S. Obama’s incendiary former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has also come up in recent Palin remarks.

“That stuff doesn’t carry weight,” Gombita says. “That’s in his past. I don’t think he has any association with those people now.”

Mary Taucher, another neighbor and wavering voter, isn’t so sure. “It bothers me,” she says. “I’m worried about the things I’m hearing.”

Like Taucher, Morrison also considers the information she’s getting about Obama’s background. But as the weeks pass, she says, it seems increasingly superfluous. Her $2,400 monthly pension benefit dropped to $200 after her husband died in August. She learned she needs a liver transplant. She plans to sell her house because she can’t make ends meet.

To reach voters such as Morrison, says Mark Blumenthal, a former Democratic pollster who now edits pollster.com, McCain must link his character attacks to the idea that Obama “can’t deliver on these issues that matter most.”

McCain’s television ads this week have labeled Obama “dangerous,” “dishonorable” and “not presidential.” (An Obama ad calls McCain “out of touch,” and his campaign has raised questions about McCain’s role in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s and early 1990s.) A study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project released Wednesday labeled nearly all of McCain’s ads last week negative, compared with a third of Obama’s.

McCain senior adviser Mark Salter says the campaign isn’t ignoring American’s top concern. “McCain is talking about the economy every day,” Salter says. “He has a plan and he’s been talking about it for months.”

Parsons reported from Pittsburgh, Tankersley from Washington. Chicago Tribune correspondent Jill Zuckman contributed to this report from Nashville.