LANSING, Mich. -- At no fewer than five Barack Obama campaign stops last week, crowds broke into song before, during or after his remarks, offering a "Happy Birthday" wish to the Democratic candidate.
But one occasion stood out, when the audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sang the familiar lyrics with a twist: "Happy birthday, Mister President, happy birthday to you."
At moments like this, a candidate can only smile and continue on. But in this environment, the gesture of goodwill from the audience was turned into another talking point for the Republican Party, another "Audacity Watch" e-mail.
This one simply repeated the facts, that an audience got a little ahead of itself. But it offered a dual opportunity for the GOP to make its case not only about the presumptuous attitude of the presumptive Democratic nominee and his supporters, but about his relative youth, two storylines that grabbed major attention this week.
Today, the junior senator from Illinois marks his 47th birthday. He would by no means be our youngest president; Teddy Roosevelt assumed the office at 42 upon the death of William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected, at 43. It may surprise some to know that Obama would be older than even Bill Clinton, who took the oath of office at 46. But as Clinton articulated while campaigning for his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, by the time of his election, he had already served 12 years as governor of Arkansas. Obama offers just two full years in the Senate, with a half-dozen years in the Illinois legislature before that.
The age difference between the two presidential nominees is the largest ever. And though John McCain's advanced age is the subject of muted conversation, Republicans have regularly questioned Obama, if not for his youth, then for his lack of experience. "Is he ready to lead?" asked the infamous "Celeb" ad released last week.
Obama sought to counter these concerns last week by asking his audiences what was the bigger risk: choosing a candidate like him, who had a "funny name" and did not look like other presidents, or a candidate like McCain, who Obama said would offer four more years of the failed policies of the Bush administration.
"When we are in such dire straits economically, when our foreign policy has gotten so messed up, what's a bigger risk: Choosing change or choosing to do the same things that got us into this mess in the first place?" Obama asked a crowd in Union, Mo., last week. "That is, the real risk is that we miss this moment, that we miss this time that we decide we're not going to go ahead and do what is needed because we're afraid. ... We've never shied away from, we've never been fearful of the future."
But this tack was met with immediate resistance, opening up a new front in the general election contest: a discussion of race. Few, if any, of the reporters who covered the Union event viewed Obama's remarks as invoking the race card. But the McCain campaign accused him of doing so the next day, setting off a cable-news extravaganza of finger-wagging, accusations and counteraccusations.
McCain himself said there was no doubt Obama was accusing him of race-baiting, something Obama disputed at a press conference Saturday.
"In no way do I think that John McCain's campaign was being racist. I think they're cynical," he told reporters in Cape Canaveral, Fla. "I think they want to distract people from talking about the real issues."
And that is why the campaign says it will not return fire on issues not related to policy. While Obama regularly refers to "old politics" and the politics of the past, promoting his candidacy as something new, the campaign says these are not allusions to McCain's age, adding that the message was the same in the primary campaign. Instead, the Obama camp's primary line of attack has been to link McCain to President Bush.
"We have not now, nor will we ever, make an issue of the difference in the candidates' ages," said senior campaign spokeswoman Linda Douglass.
Maybe that's because the senator himself doesn't feel so young anymore.
"I notice that I've been getting gray since this campaign started," Obama told a crowd in St. Petersburg on Friday. "When I started the campaign, everybody called me a young man. They're not calling me that anymore."
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