“He’s certainly tougher and better than he was in the early part of the primary season,” Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio told The Observer in a brief interview after the event in Berea. “But he does it in almost a playful way. His criticism of Senator McCain today was not mean-spirited. It was direct and it was blunt and you know exactly what he was saying, but it was not done in a way that was angry or hostile.”
The Obama campaign has called on surrogates to help amplify the message. On Monday and Tuesday alone, economic advisers Laura Tyson, Robert Reich and Austan Goolsbee, as well as senior Democratic figures like Bill Richardson, Frederico Pena, Tom Daschle and Ken Salazar, all appeared on television hitting Mr. McCain as part of the energy offensive.
It certainly got the media’s attention.
Early Tuesday morning, the local Ohio television news anchor announced “all eyes are on Youngstown” for Mr. Obama’s discussion of energy at a campaign event at an area high school.
Mr. Obama looked entirely comfortable in the more hostile environment. At around 8:30 a.m., he returned to the Hampton Inn from his morning workout wearing a sweaty white T-shirt and a blue baseball cap. Groggy reporters watched his motorcade as they waited to have their bags sniffed by a police dog in a parking lot. Some checked their BlackBerrys, reading a message from the Democratic National Committee’s announcement of a new Web site, TheNextCheney.com, preemptively attacking Mr. McCain’s choice for vice president.
A few minutes later, Mr. Obama’s black campaign bus, followed by a small van (“Precious Cargo,” it read across the door) and a coach bus carrying the press corps, drove through the state’s economically hard-hit rust belt, past signs for a “Receivership Auction,” and pulled into the Austintown Fitch High School in Youngstown, where the Fitch Falcons practiced on the football field. After introductions by Senator Sherrod Brown and Governor Strickland, Mr. Obama took the stage, where he received an impromptu and day-late serenade of “Happy Birthday” from the roughly 2,000 people in the mixed crowd.
Then he laid into Mr. McCain.
Now wearing a dark suit and blue striped tie, Mr. Obama again defended himself against a McCain ad comparing him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, calling it irreverent toward the concerns of American voters. “I don’t have to deal with that mess,” he said. Later, he spoke about the barrage of character attacks the McCain campaign had launched over the past week. “That’s nothing to be proud of,” he said.
Standing at a podium labeled “New Energy for America,” he sought to convince the crowd that Mr. McCain represented old energy and framed the disagreement over gas and electricity and power as part of a larger debate between old versus new.
The first questioner at the town-hall-style event was less subtle in raising concerns about the age of certain legislators. He said he was bothered by octogenarians in Congress making decisions for the future and asked if Mr. Obama supported term or age limits.
“This is kind of a tricky question for me,” said Mr. Obama. He went on to say that he had colleagues well into their 70s who were doing tremendous work, and that he preferred elections to term limits. “I’m less concerned of what age folks are than what they’re doing.”
Nonetheless, it seemed as if his audiences were latching onto the more critical material.
“It concerned me when he said McCain was in the Senate for 26 years and didn’t do anything. Why should we think he would all of a sudden do something as president,” said Monica Holland, a 40-year-old recruiter for General Motors from nearby Austintown. “That was a red flag for me.”
Judith Stanger, 70, a retired teacher from nearby Boardman, also took a positive view of the Obama campaign’s more personal, age-based assault on Mr. McCain.
“I heard that on TV yesterday,” she said. “It’s every bit as valid as the tripe McCain has been saying. I mean, Moses parting the Red Sea? Please.”
(She was referring to one of the McCain campaign’s messiah-themed ads mocking the hype surrounding Mr. Obama.)
But Ms. Stanger also said she hoped Mr. Obama would continue to ignore what she called his opponent’s “low” attacks and talk about issues.
“I don’t think he dares to lower himself to their level,” she said, earnestly.
jhorowitz@observer.com
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