OBAMA: In the Weeks to Come, A Costly Battle on Two Fronts

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Candidates React: Obama

Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) addresses his supporters from Houston, Tx. after Tuesday's primary election results filter in.

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Clinton's TV ad last week questioning Obama's readiness in a national security crisis threw him on the defensive, and Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee's meeting with a Canadian consulate official -- a meeting the campaign initially denied had happened -- raised questions about his candor. Couple those issues with the opening days of former Obama supporter Rezko's corruption trial, and Obama entered yesterday's primary elections in the midst of a serious rough patch.

"There's no doubt that if you're being attacked every day, it creates a sense of turbulence," Obama acknowledged.

The campaign's casual response to the Goolsbee episode seemed to assume a presumption of innocence that does not exist for politicians. A story that could have been dealt with the day it broke on Canadian television was instead handled carelessly. Obama said he was told that the story was untrue, but later it became clear that a meeting had taken place, and Clinton seized on the contradiction to portray her opponent as a liar.

"That was the information I had at the time," Obama pleaded on Monday.

Clinton unveiled her "red phone" ad in Texas suggesting that Obama is a foreign policy naif, just as advisers were urging Obama to challenge Clinton's contention that she holds a vast foreign policy advantage. But Obama held back until Sunday afternoon, in Westerville, Ohio.

"We're still waiting to hear Senator Clinton tell us what precise foreign policy experience that she is claiming, that makes her prepared to answer that phone call at three in the morning," Obama said to deafening cheers.

Then he dropped the issue. When reporters were pummeling him at the Monday news conference, Obama described his rival in the most banal of terms. "She is a hardworking candidate," he said.

Even before yesterday, senior Obama campaign officials had been preparing to shift the campaign's "optics," if not the message. Obama's most compelling attribute was supposed to be likability. But as the Obama phenomenon grew, the campaign sent him to ever-larger arenas, transforming him from a regular guy into a virtual demigod before throngs of screaming admirers. Campaign aides then tried to combine intimate, policy-focused roundtables with rallies, but local news broadcasts ran only images of the rallies.

Now, the campaign hopes to keep the rallies separate from the roundtables in each media market. "We all are uncomfortable with a campaign whose signature is a rally," Axelrod said. "If you overdo this, you can lend credence to a caricature that is untrue and unhelpful."

Making adjustments is something all campaigns do. But this is not the situation that Obama's aides hoped they would be in. Axelrod acknowledged that fatigue is setting in. "There's a weariness," he said. "We're in the 27th inning of a nine-inning game."

Staff writers Peter Slevin, Michael D. Shear, and Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.