At a Scranton, Pa., stop on Friday, Obama said, "When they say this isn't about issues, it's about personalities, what they're really saying is, 'We're going to try to scare people about Barack. So we're going to say that, you know, maybe he's got Muslim connections, or we're going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals, or he's not patriotic.'"
Davis, in a statement yesterday, called Obama's remark "a cynical attempt to play the victim" and an example of the old-style politics the Democrat claims to eschew.
"The McCain campaign understands that its candidate has a better chance of winning a contest over character than over issues," William Galston of the liberal Brookings Institution wrote in a post-convention analysis. McCain is presenting himself as "a safe choice for uncertain times."
"Obama's challenge," he added, "is to make Americans comfortable with the idea of him as president so that the forces underlying this year's contest come to the fore. ... It is a testament to McCain's personal appeal - and to the uncertainty Obama has not yet dispelled - that the race remains as close as it is."
Paul Wilson, a Republican media consultant and occasional adviser to the McCain camp, said the election "is getting framed as this massive personality battle. You would think it would be about the economy, and you would think the war would be in there some place, but so far they're not."
Obama strategists say that McCain's pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate was part of an effort to set up an argument over social values, and such hot-button topics as gay marriage and abortion. But they predicted that any attempt to revive the culture wars of past campaigns would be overwhelmed by economic worries in most voters' minds.
Republicans hope that Palin, a religious conservative with strong anti-abortion views, will help McCain attract more votes from the women and socially conservative Catholics he needs to defeat Obama.
Palin's initial impact on the election was described as "a wash" by Gary Langer of ABC News, in an analysis of a national opinion survey about McCain's vice presidential pick. Reactions to Palin broke heavily along the existing partisan divide, the poll found, and produced no immediate boost for McCain among women voters. Moderate independents, an important target for both campaigns, reacted more positively to Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, than to Palin, according to the survey.
