'Barack Obama Is My Candidate'

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Hillary Clinton Speaks to Unite Democrats DNC

In a momentous speech Tuesday night at the Democratic national Convention, Hillary Clinton stressed unity and support for Barack Obama for the future of the party.

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As convention delegates looked toward the evening program, top Democratic elected officials continued to raise questions about Obama's campaign strategy and worried aloud that he must do more to overcome the doubts that voters in their states have about his readiness to be president. Their concerns came as McCain blasted Obama in a speech to the American Legion convention in Phoenix.

Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a prominent Clinton supporter, said that Obama is still struggling to connect with working-class voters and that the presumptive nominee reminded him of Adlai Stevenson, the brainy Illinoisan who lost the presidential campaigns of 1952 and 1956.

"You ask him a question, and he gives you a six-minute answer," Rendell told Washington Post reporters and editors. "And the six-minute answer is smart as all get-out. It's intellectual. It's well framed. It takes care of all the contingencies. But it's a lousy sound bite."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said Obama's campaign must demonstrate its willingness to engage against a Republican Party that he said is well skilled in political combat.

"The only thing they're going to do is, in old Brooklyn terms, rabbit-punch every day, and Obama has to show the American people that he can rabbit-punch, that he can be in that street fight," he told The Post. "I think there was a reluctance initially in the Obama campaign to engage in that. I think they now realize they have to."

If Monday night's convention program lacked a fighting spirit, Obama brought his to the campaign trail on Tuesday -- fiercely laying out the case for his candidacy and the contrast with McCain. Obama even mentioned McCain's prisoner-of-war status in Vietnam in a way that suggested he will begin to challenge that as a credential for being president.

"John McCain has a great biography, has been a POW," Obama told a small group gathered at an aircraft maintenance facility in Kansas City, Mo. "I have a funny name." He said the Republicans are arguing "that you don't know whether I can be trusted to lead."

"But I'm just going to remind everyone here: This election is not about me," he said. "It's about you. It's about who's going to be fighting for you."

McCain, meanwhile, continued to pound away at Obama in his speech to the American Legion. He accused the senator from Illinois of failing to stand up to criticism of the United States elsewhere in the world and ridiculed his rival's words during a speech in Berlin last month, in which Obama said "the world stands as one" as it looks to the future.

"The Cold War ended not because the world stood 'as one' but because the great democracies came together, bound together by sustained and decisive American leadership," McCain said.

That Republican effort continued with a new McCain ad that uses Clinton's words about her rival during the Democratic primary campaign in an ad about a 3 a.m. phone call to the White House: "I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002." A narrator in the McCain ad continues: "Hillary's right. John McCain for president."

And even after Clinton's speech Tuesday night, McCain's campaign made it clear that it would not hesitate to continue invoking her rhetoric from the primary season.