Obama, McCain duel over celebrity ad, attacks

The battle for the White House took a nasty turn yesterday when John McCain accused Barack Obama of "playing the race card".

While race surfaced earlier this year during Obama's contest with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, it had been absent from McCain's fight with Obama.

McCain's team blamed a speech made the previous day by Obama, in which the Democratic candidate claimed his Republican rival was trying to frighten voters by saying Obama had a strange name and did not look like other presidents.

Obama's campaign team denied it had played the race card and accused McCain's team of "gutter-style politics" over aggressive personal ads this week.

Democrat Barack Obama accused White House rival John McCain of trying on Wednesday to scare voters with attacks on his character, as McCain launched a new ad labeling Obama more of a celebrity than a leader.

"What they're going to do is make you scared -- of me," Obama told voters in Springfield, Missouri, as he pushed his message of middle-class economic relief in a Republican part of a key battleground state in November's presidential election.

Obama, launching a four-day tour of swing states to promote his economic policies, mocked the arguments he said McCain, a Republican Arizona senator, and his supporters make.

"'He's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. He doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills,'" said Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president.

On Wednesday alone, the McCain campaign released a new advertisement suggesting — and not in a good way — that Mr. Obama was a celebrity along the lines of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Republicans tried to portray Mr. Obama as a candidate who believed the race was all about him, relying on what Democrats said was a completely inaccurate quotation.

The Republican National Committee began an anti-Obama Web site called “Audacity Watch,” a play on the title of Mr. Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.” And, in a concerted volley of television interviews, news releases and e-mail, campaign representatives attacked him on a wide range of issues, including tax policies and energy proposals.

The moves are the McCain campaign’s most full-throttled effort to define Mr. Obama negatively, on its own terms, by creating a narrative intended to turn the public off to an opponent.