"He's going to have to refine his message for the general election," Devine said. "It's still going to be a message of change, but it's going to have to be more detailed about the specifics. He's going to be facing a more skeptical audience."
Moreover, Devine said, "he needs to give them a fundamental reassurance that he has the capacity to be president -- to defend the nation, to serve as commander in chief."
"He has some demystifying to do," agreed Jim Jordan, another longtime Democratic strategist who, like Devine, worked for neither Obama nor Clinton this year. "Republican attacks on him will be largely based on experience and ideology. . . . He needs to show that he's tough enough and strong enough to guide the country in a dangerous world."
Polls show that most voters prefer Obama's positions to McCain's on a wide range of major issues: the war in Iraq, the economy and healthcare, for example. But they rate McCain more highly on his experience in foreign policy and his ability to confront international terrorism.
Obama may tackle those issues as early as today, when he is scheduled to speak before the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation's largest pro-Israel lobbying group. McCain ridiculed Obama before the group Monday for his offer to meet with Iran's president without preconditions.
The Jewish voters who support AIPAC are only one of several traditionally Democratic constituencies that have been hesitant to support Obama. In most Democratic primaries, Obama won among young voters, college-educated voters and African American voters, but he lost to Clinton among white voters without college degrees and among Latinos.
"One of the things he has to do is to turn very clearly to those working-class voters, identify with their economic pain, and . . . show that he is focused on the economic issues that concern them," Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said.
"And he has to pass a cultural identification test. He's never going to be a member of the white working class, and a candidate should never fake that," Mellman said, in a reference to Obama's embarrassing effort to go bowling in Pennsylvania. "But he's got to show that he is relating to people in some way, by talking with people."
In some recent polls, as many as one-third of the Democrats who voted for Clinton in the primaries said they would vote for McCain, not Obama, in the general election. But Mellman said that although voters sometimes expressed those intentions in the heat of a bitter primary fight, in most presidential elections few members of either party actually switched sides.
