Article for my Letter to the Editor

Feeling a Challenge, Obama Sharpens His Silver Tongue
By JEFF ZELENY
LEBANON, Va. — A new character is making a debut at Senator Barack Obama’s campaign rallies: His name is John McCain.
It began quietly on Monday in Michigan, but grew in volume as Mr. Obama made his way from Flint to Farmington Hills, carrying over to a speech on Tuesday morning in Ohio. By the time he arrived for an evening stop in the southwestern tip of Virginia, Mr. Obama’s sales pitch contained nearly as many references to Senator McCain as to himself, suggesting how the McCain campaign has been driving the recent dialogue of the presidential race.
“John McCain says he’s about change, too — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics,” Mr. Obama told his supporters here. “That’s just calling the same thing something different.”
With a laugh, he added: “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change; it’s still going to stink after eight years.”
In the latest sign of the campaign’s heightened intensity, Mr. McCain’s surrogates responded within minutes and called on Mr. Obama to apologize to Gov. Sarah Palin for the lipstick remark. But to those in the audience, it was clear that Mr. Obama was employing an age-old phrase — lipstick on a pig — and referring to Mr. McCain’s policies. He had not yet mentioned Ms. Palin at that point of his speech.
The exchange came as Mr. Obama has been stepping up his own rhetoric as he has sought to draw attention back to himself after a week in which Ms. Palin has dominated the stage.
For all the discussion about polls this week, perhaps the best barometer of the state of the campaign can be found by simply taking a listen to Mr. Obama as Election Day rushes up on him.
With just 57 days remaining in this long presidential race, Mr. Obama is going after Mr. McCain more aggressively than at any other point in the campaign, with a professorial tone giving way to one of prosecution. These days, he sounds more like those sharp-tongued commercials seen on television.
“Do you really believe John McCain is going to make a difference now?” Mr. Obama said, mentioning his rival’s name twice in the same breath, a pattern he repeated again and again. “John McCain doesn’t get it.”
His advisers said that combative edge was essential to blunt any progress Mr. McCain was making as he sought to encroach on Mr. Obama’s trademark message of change. Or perhaps it is in response to cries of alarm from Democrats who believe he is being too mild-mannered.
But Mr. Obama’s remarks are curiously reminiscent — right down to that mocking tone — to words he spoke nearly a year ago when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton suddenly tried to swipe the mantle of change and Mr. Obama demonstrated a fight that many Democrats had doubted he could muster.
Mr. Obama has been in this place before: finding the proper temperature to aggressively critique — or attack — his rival without tarnishing his own image of trying to remain above traditional politics. As he enters the final eight weeks of the race, advisers said, the lessons from the Democratic primaries are alive in his head.
Mr. McCain and his running mate, Ms. Palin, seem to be there, too.
“A month ago, they were all saying, ‘Oh, it’s experience, experience, experience,’ ” Mr. Obama said, speaking over booming applause the other night in a high school gymnasium. “Then they chose Palin and they started talking about change, change, change. What happened? What happened? What happened?”
For one of the few times in his presidential candidacy, Mr. Obama is suddenly not the freshest and most telegenic figure on the ballot. While he seems to have settled on a line of attack against Mr. McCain, his campaign appearances in the past 12 days make clear that he is still grappling with his approach to Ms. Palin.
He has declared her family off limits. He has praised her biography, telling an audience, “Mother, governor, moose shooter — that’s cool.” But he has taken sharp aim at her record as Alaska governor, vigorously questioning her evolving stance on the state’s so-called bridge to nowhere.
“She was for it until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it,” Mr. Obama said, speaking over an applauding crowd in Michigan. “I mean, you can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid.”
There were plentiful signs in recent days that the voters turning out to see Mr. Obama liked his forceful tone, with several audiences chanting along with him, “Eight is Enough! Eight is Enough!” which has become a rallying cry for changing Washington.
Newly invigorated, his presence and energy on stage resembled how he began to act last fall as his extended primary battle with Mrs. Clinton became fully engaged.
But as in that contest, Mr. Obama’s aggressive posture comes with possible pitfalls — real or created by the opposition — as he again navigates the tricky terrain of gender politics.
As Mr. Obama’s motorcade passed through the Appalachian countryside on Tuesday night, aides inside his campaign headquarters back in Chicago were fighting back criticism over the lipstick-on-a-pig remark, assertively trying to steer the conversation back to attacking Mr. McCain.