When Obama faces an opponent with real policy differences

Adam Nagourney:

When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton goes after Senator Barack Obama these days, she presses him on the details of his health care plan, criticizes the wording of his campaign mailings and likens his promise of change to celestial choirs.

But if Mr. Obama becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, he is sure to face an onslaught from Republicans and their allies that will be very different in tone and intensity from what he has faced so far.

In the last few days alone, Senator John McCain has mocked a statement Mr. Obama made about Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Tennessee Republican Party, identifying him with his middle name as Barack Hussein Obama, suggested that his foreign policy would be shaped by people who are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.

The Republican National Committee issued a statement on Wednesday invoking a questionnaire Mr. Obama filled out when running for Senate in 2004 to show that he once opposed cracking down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

Without using Mr. Obama’s name, President Bush, at a White House news conference on Thursday, assailed his willingness to meet Cuba’s new leader, Raúl Castro, without preconditions, saying that to do so would grant “great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.”

For much of this year, Mr. Obama has been handled with relative care by Mrs. Clinton and, before they dropped out, the other Democratic candidates. They generally do not have huge policy differences with him, and they have been wary of making a particularly harsh attack that winds up in a Republican television advertisement this fall.

Yet the shifting tone offers a glimpse of the Republican playbook as the party adapts to the prospect that it will be running against Mr. Obama rather than Mrs. Clinton.

It is a reminder that should Mr. Obama win the nomination, he will be playing on a more treacherous political battleground as his opponents — scouring through his record of votes and statements and his experiences before he entered public life — look for ways to portray him as out of step with the nation’s values, challenge his appeal to independent voters and emphasize his lack of experience in foreign policy and national security.

Some of this will almost certainly take the shape of the Internet rumors and whispering campaigns that have popped up against Mr. Obama since he got into the race, like the false reports that he is Muslim. Others will no doubt come from the types of shadowy independent committees that have played a big role in campaigns in recent years.

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No it won't. There is too much serious disagreement with Obama on policy to get wrapped up in Internet rumors. He is dead wrong on the war. That alone is enough to discredit him in the eyes of half the voters. His prescriptions are all liberal ones and only 20 percent of this country will even admit to being liberal.

In the Democrat primary Clinton has had to cede too much ground to him on liberal issues that Republicans will not. On NAFTA alone, he is embarrassingly wrong on the facts and the issues, yet she has not been willing to defend one of her husbands true achievements that has been good for America. Obama has been embarrassingly wrong on what is going on on the ground in Iraq, yet she has allowed him to keep the focus on the vote to go into the war rather than the best policy to defeat the enemy. She has allowed herself to get into a competition on how fast to retreat than how best to win.

All this concern about Obama's middle name is silly on both sides. It is not a slur to call someone by their middle name even if it is unusual. I should know since I have gone through life being called by my middle name which is far from common. Obama has been running away from it so fast it is a wonder CAIR has not challenged him for being embarrassed by having a Muslim name. Republicans who claim that calling him by his middle name is a slur, are in fact slurring Muslim names. Get over it people. His name is what it is and neither side should be shy about using it to describe him. As far as I am concerned it is a none issue whether it is used or not.

Obama is going to be defeated on the specifics of his policy positions and not his race or his name. He is going to be defeated because he is wrong about Iraq and other national security issues. He is going to be defeated because he is wrong about trade and NAFTA. He is going to be defeated because he wants control freak solutions to health care. there will be other issues that will surface that defeat him, but they will have nothing to do with his name or any association with Islam. The church he attends has as many weird beliefs as the one Mitt Romney attends, but ultimately, religion will not be a major issue.