McCain can't make attacks stick to Obama

By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican accusations against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama have come fast and thick, from palling around with terrorists to being a tax-loving socialist.

But Obama has proven surprisingly adept at shrugging off rival John McCain's attacks and opinion polls show McCain is the one whose image has suffered from the negativity.

"Obama has handled himself very calmly and in many ways has seemed steadier than McCain -- and McCain has really helped him create that impression," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

"He's tried a lot of things. Obama has done a good job of countering them."

Obama's resiliency has surprised Republican strategists who entered the campaign for the November 4 election believing he was vulnerable to the sort of attacks that helped bring down recent Democratic candidates like John Kerry and Al Gore.

Republican consultant Kevin Madden, an aide to Mitt Romney during his presidential run and to President George W. Bush in 2004, said Obama was helped by McCain's failure to settle on a clear line of attack.

Bush hammered Kerry in 2004 as a "flip-flopper" for months until "about 40 days before the election, it kicked in," Madden said. Gore was relentlessly mocked in 2000 as an elitist who was out of step with mainstream America.

McCain, a veteran Arizona senator, flipped quickly through similar attacks and many more in the months since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in June, never settling on a theme.

"The McCain campaign hit the reset button far too often," Madden said. "Obama emerged from the primaries with a lot of vulnerabilities but making those into liabilities required a very consistent focus that they never developed."

During the summer, McCain mocked Obama as a political celebrity and elitist, criticized his shifting positions and made fun of his penchant for huge rallies and high-flying rhetoric.

But Republican hopes that Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, could be painted as dangerously inexperienced were negated by McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, the nationally unknown first-term governor of Alaska, as his running mate.

Efforts to portray Obama as too liberal, with a history of associations like his service on a Chicago community board with a former 1960s radical, failed to gain steam as the economic crisis deepened and Obama performed steadily in a series of debates.

McCain's reaction to the financial crisis -- he initially called the fundamentals of the economy strong as it teetered then suspended his campaign to work on a bailout but resumed before it was completed -- diminished his criticisms of Obama.

'OUT OF TOUCH WITH THE MOMENT'

"McCain at times has appeared out of touch with the moment," said Simon Rosenberg, head of the Democratic advocacy group NDN. "While Americans are worried about their economic survival, he was talking about a 1960s radical."