WASHINGTON — Barack Obama's campaign was nearly swamped this spring when his pastor's inflammatory sermons were widely publicized. He averted disaster and has so far avoided damage from ties to 1960s radical William Ayers and disgraced fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko.
But now John McCain, trailing in the polls, is reviving questions about Obama's past.
Vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has brought up the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and Monday she repeated her accusation that the Democratic nominee had befriended terrorists, while McCain asked, "Who is the real Barack Obama?"
Both campaigns have long planned for this newly negative moment, but with the world embroiled in an economic meltdown, the script is taking unexpected turns -- and the old lines of attack could fall flat.
Rather than command public attention, as the Wright controversy did, the debate over Obama's past is being overshadowed by the loss of thousands of jobs every day and a steep decline in the stock market. With voters overwhelmed by major news events, character attacks can easily be lost in the din.
But McCain and Palin have drawn attention to them by raising the charges against Obama themselves in unusually strident terms, a move that runs the risk of turning off undecided voters or sounding discordant in a time of public unease.
"The question is, can you reintroduce character in the last 30 days of the campaign and tie it to the current economic crisis?" said Chris LaCivita, who is advising a conservative group that has aired ads in several states attacking the Obama-Ayers connection.
Obama is leaving little to chance. On Monday, he answered McCain, unleashing a major effort to remind voters of McCain's association with the Keating Five banking scandal, a chapter the campaign is trying to tie to the current financial disaster. Obama's camp also escalated its effort to question McCain's temperament, with a new TV ad calling him "erratic."
For all of their careful planning, neither side could possibly have predicted that they would be waging the final four weeks of the campaign amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
It is a particular challenge for Republicans, who acknowledge that Obama has gained ground at a time that voters appear to trust him more than McCain to fix the economy and are blaming many of the troubles on President Bush.
