AFTER a week of trying to portray Senator Barack Obama as a friend of terrorists who would drive the country into bankruptcy, Senator John McCain abruptly changed his tone on Friday night, telling voters at a town hall-style meeting that Obama was "a decent person" and a "family man", and suggesting that he would be an acceptable president should he win the White House.
But moments later, McCain, the Republican nominee, renewed his attacks on Obama for his association with the 1960s radical William Ayers and told the crowd: "Obama's political career was launched in Ayers' living room."
The dizzying statements cam
e on a confused day when McCain's campaign pounded Obama as a "liar" in an incendiary television commercial about Ayers.
The events reflected McCain's frequently lurching campaign. As the polls have shown Obama, the Democratic nominee, gaining increasing ground in the past few weeks, McCain's roadshow has veered from message to message and from pumping up hostile crowds to trying to calm them down.
Each news cycle seems to bring another tactic, as the campaign appears to be trying anything and everything to see what might work.
When a man told him he was "scared" of an Obama presidency, McCain replied: "I want to be president of the United States and obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be, but I have to tell you – I have to tell you – he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States." The crowd booed loudly at McCain's response.
Later a woman stood up at the meeting, held at Lakeville South High School in a far suburb of Minneapolis, and told McCain that she could not trust Obama because he was an "Arab".
McCain replied: "No, ma'am, he's a decent family man, a citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that's what this campaign is all about." At that, the crowd applauded.
