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The campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) criticized Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) Wednesday, echoing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) complaint that the Democratic front-runner has abandoned his promise of a new style of politics. After Obama criticized McCain this week for speeches the Arizona senator delivered on the economy, a McCain spokesman issued a statement saying that Obama is guilty of smear politics. “Sen. Obama’s blatant mischaracterizations aren’t the new politics he’s promised America, they’re the old attack and smear tactics that Americans are tired of,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said. “Barack Obama’s diagnosis for our housing market is clearly that Barack Obama knows best — raise taxes on hardworking Americans and give government a prescription to spend.” The McCain camp’s comments came Wednesday afternoon just hours after the Republican National Committee (RNC) chastised its Democratic counterparts for portraying McCain as a war enthusiast. McCain delivered a foreign policy address Wednesday in which he said he hates war, after days of Democrats' seizing on the Arizona senator’s statement that the U.S. could stay in Iraq for 100 years. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), repeated the refrain Wednesday that electing McCain would be the same as voting for President Bush again. “John McCain’s empty rhetoric today can’t change the fact that he has steadfastly stood with President Bush from Day One and is now talking about keeping our troops in Iraq for 100 years,” Dean said in a statement after McCain’s address. “His new appreciation for diplomacy has no credibility after he mimicked President Bush's misleading case for a unilateral war of choice when it mattered most. Why should the American people now trust John McCain to offer anything more than four more years of President Bush's reckless economic policies and failed foreign policy?" Alex Conant, an RNC spokesman, called on Obama and Clinton to denounce Dean’s continued criticisms of McCain. “Obama and Clinton must tell Howard Dean to stop the blatantly and deliberately misleading attacks on John McCain,” Conant said in a statement. “No one opposes war more than John McCain, yet Dean has the gall to assert the opposite. Regardless of Howard Dean’s political attacks, the truth is that the Democrats’ policies would lead the U.S. into a wider and more difficult war.” Clinton issued a statement Wednesday afternoon echoing the DNC’s criticism, saying that while some of McCain's foreign policy speech was commendable, she continues to have a “fundamental disagreement” with him on the larger issue of Iraq. “Like President Bush, Sen. McCain continues to oppose a swift and responsible withdrawal from Iraq,” Clinton said. “Like President Bush, Sen. McCain discounts the warnings of our senior military leadership of the consequences of the Iraq war on the readiness of our armed forces, and on the need to focus on the forgotten front line in Afghanistan. Like President Bush, Sen. McCain wants to keep us tied to another country's civil war, and said ‘it would be fine with me’ if U.S. troops were in Iraq for 50 or even 100 years. That in a nutshell is the Bush/McCain Iraq policy.” |
