BOB HERBERT: Can Obama Run the Offense?

NYT

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Barack Obama is a United States senator, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his party’s candidate for president of the United States — and yet it was somehow presumptuous of him to meet with foreign leaders last week during his trip to the Middle East and Europe.

I’ll say this about Senator Obama. He sure raises people’s hackles. I’ve never seen anyone so roundly criticized for such grievous offenses as giving excellent speeches and urging people of different backgrounds to take a chance on working together. How dare he? And 200,000 people turned out to hear him in Berlin. Unforgivable.

The man has been taken to task for promoting hope, threatened with mutilation by Jesse Jackson for suggesting that a lot of black fathers could do better by their kids and had his patriotism called into question because he wants to wind down a war that most Americans would dearly love to be rid of.

John McCain can barely stop himself from sputtering at the mere mention of Senator Obama’s name. He actually ran an ad blaming Mr. Obama for high gasoline prices. Even Republicans had a good laugh at that one.

And yet Mr. Obama continues to treat Senator McCain respectfully. As far as personal character is concerned, Mr. Obama has scored very well, indeed.

What remains to be seen, now that the overseas tour is over, is whether Team Obama can play offense here at home and pile up enough points to win this election. Mr. McCain has been a surprisingly inept candidate (riding on a golf cart with Poppy Bush was almost as deadly an image as the helmeted Mike Dukakis bouncing around in a tank), but he has stayed within striking distance.

And you can’t trust any of the polls this year. I was in New Hampshire when the polls and the pundits said Mr. Obama was a lock to win that primary. He lost. And I was in California on Super Tuesday when the polls said he was closing fast. He wasn’t.

So this is not your ordinary election. Senator Obama will have to turn people on big-time just to win by a little. And for all the tedious talk about timelines and what the surge in Iraq has or has not accomplished, the top three issues in this campaign are still the economy, the economy and the economy.

Americans are losing jobs, losing the equity in their homes, losing their retirement nest eggs, and tragically, in increasing numbers, actually losing the family home itself. This is the issue on which the Obama people should long since have pounced.

A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the social contract of the 20th century — in which the government, employers and the society as a whole pulled together to see that those who worked hard and played by the rules were afforded the basic necessities of daily life and a shot at the American dream — “appears to be unraveling.”

Nearly 80 percent of those who responded to the survey, conducted for the Rockefeller Foundation and Time magazine, said they are facing greater financial risks now than in the past.

This anxiety is pervasive, and it was clearly evident a little more than two weeks ago when Phil Gramm, then John McCain’s key economic adviser, callously remarked that we were suffering from a “mental recession” and that the U.S. had become “a nation of whiners.”

The Obama crowd should have instantly seen the Gramm gaffe for what it was, a gift from the political gods. They should have run with it. I would have dragged out that old Maxine Brown song with the lyric: “Maybe it’s all in my mind.”

The Democrats could have had some fun and made political hay, using the Gramm comments to highlight what has happened to working people under Republican rule. But the Obama folks let the matter drop, and instead of an endless loop of “mental recession,” what we’ve heard incessantly over the past couple of weeks has been Mr. McCain pounding on Mr. Obama about the surge.

The word is that an economic offensive may finally be coming from the Obama campaign.

Anna Burger, the secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, was part of a wide-ranging group of advisers on economic issues who met with Mr. Obama in Washington on Monday. “He has very serious policies, not sound bites, for addressing the long-term and short-term issues that are having such a dramatic effect on people who are working and trying to make ends meet,” she said.

Translating those ideas into a compelling economic narrative for his campaign — something Mr. Obama has not yet done — is the key to defeating John McCain.