McCain foreign policy susceptible to Obama attack

By David Morgan - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican candidate John McCain could be vulnerable on foreign policy and national security -- his major campaign assets up to now -- if Barack Obama can paint him as a symbol of contradiction and hardline ideology, experts say.

McCain -- a former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war with 25 years in Congress to Obama's three -- has made his experience a centerpiece of his campaign for the November presidential election while accusing Obama of being weak and untested.

Democrats led by Obama himself have tried to portray McCain as no different from President George W. Bush, whose popularity has plummeted along with that of a 5-year-old Iraq war for which many Americans blame neoconservatives in his administration.

"This is an opportunity for us to take the fight to the Republicans and not just be reactive on foreign policy and national security, but be aggressive," said Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is viewed as a possible Obama running mate.

McCain has been leading Obama on foreign policy in opinion polls. Fifty-one percent of registered voters see the Arizona senator's positions as "about right," vs. 43 percent for Obama, according to data collected May 21-25 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Another 43 percent of voters said Obama was "not tough enough" in the foreign relations sphere, while three percent called him "too tough." By contrast, 16 percent said McCain was not tough enough and 22 percent said he was too tough. The data has a 3.5 percent margin of error.

But Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank who opposed the Iraq war, said McCain's candidacy could be seriously damaged if Democrats mount a sustained attack aimed specifically at the Republican's long-standing ties to the neoconservatives known as neocons.

VERY, VERY DANGEROUS

Carpenter believes that the more realist advisers such as Henry Kissinger on the McCain campaign are largely window-dressing to protect him from Democratic charges that he is really a neoconservative

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"John McCain is almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the neoconservative movement when it comes to foreign policy," Carpenter said.

"The Democrats have to go on the offensive and stay on the offensive. The message has to be: John McCain and his foreign policy team are very, very dangerous for America," he added. "A worried American electorate on that score might very well shy away from McCain."

Not that the McCain people would be surprised by an Obama campaign strategy that painted McCain as a neoconservative.

"If I were Obama's people I would just say: 'Neocon, neocon, neocon.' That would be a fun thing to do," said a McCain adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the campaign.

"But McCain knows his own mind, and I wouldn't call him uniformly one thing or another."