Clark: McCain Oversold Military Experience

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General Wesley Clark, an adviser to Senator Obama, said yesterday that Senator McCain has oversold his military and national security experience.

The Arizona senator “has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has traveled all over the world, but he hasn’t held executive responsibility,” General Clark, one of Mr. Obama’s chief foreign policy advisers, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.

Even the squadron in the Navy that Mr. McCain commanded “wasn’t a wartime squadron,” General Clark said. “He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall.”

A spokesman for Mr. McCain, Brian Rogers, responded that the candidate is proud of his military record and history of “putting the country first.” He then criticized Mr. Obama for not traveling to Iraq to see conditions firsthand since January 2006, and for failing to practice the “new type of politics” the Illinois senator has espoused.

“The reality is he’s proving to be a typical politician who is willing to say anything to get elected, including allowing his campaign surrogates to demean and attack John McCain’s military service record,” Mr. Rogers said in an e-mailed statement.

Mr. Obama, in an effort to shore up his foreign policy credentials, is planning travel to Europe and the Middle East in the next few months, though his campaign has not confirmed ABC News reports that he will travel to Iraq and Afghanistan.

McCAIN MEETS WITH BILLY GRAHAM, SON

Senator McCain met yesterday with evangelist Billy Graham and his son, Franklin, at the family’s mountaintop retreat.

The Republican presidential candidate, who is actively courting religious voters and trying to reassure skeptical conservatives, visited privately with the Grahams on the grounds of Little Piney Cove in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina.

“We had a very excellent conversation. I appreciated the opportunity to visit with them,” Mr. McCain said after the minute meeting.

“The senator and I both have sons currently serving in the military, and also have a common interest in aviation,” Franklin Graham said. “I was impressed by his personal faith and his moral clarity on important social issues facing America today.”

SCHWARZENEGGER GRILLED ON ‘MEET THE PRESS’

Governor Schwarzenegger, usually marveled at by the national press, found himself being told by the host of yesterday’s “Meet the Press” that if he ran a private company the way he has run the state, he might have been fired by now.

Tom Brokaw, host of the NBC show through the presidential election, put a series of confrontational questions to the governor in an interview taped in California and aired yesterday.

“When you ran for governor in 2003, you ran as a fiscal conservative who would change the system, who would bring business-like techniques,” Mr. Brokaw said. “Now, you are facing a $15 billion deficit here in California. Unemployment is running at about 6.8%; you’ve got the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. If you were the CEO of a public company, the board would probably say, ‘It is time to go.'”

Mr. Schwarzenegger joked: “Are you always this positive?”

McCAIN ALLIES SHARPEN ATTACKS

Senator McCain’s allies have seized on a new and aggressive line of attack against Senator Obama, casting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as an opportunistic and self-obsessed politician who will do and say anything to get elected.

Mr. McCain typically leaves the sharpened criticism to others, in the hope of being able to claim the high ground of conducting a “respectful” campaign. But the abrupt shift in tone among his paid staff members, volunteer surrogates, and other Republican staples of the cable news circuit is unmistakable, and resembles the unified message the Republican Party used to paint Senator Kerry as a flip-flopper in the 2004 campaign.

It also reflects a growing belief among Mr. McCain’s strategists that the campaign for the White House will be won or lost based on voters’ view of Mr. Obama’s character. In a strategy memo released Thursday, Mr. McCain’s top political adviser accused Mr. Obama of “self-serving partisanship.”

“In his time on the national stage, he has consistently put his party and his self-interest first,” Steve Schmidt said in the memo. “We have seen Barack Obama forced to choose between principle and the interests of himself and his party. He has always chosen the latter.”


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