By PATRICK HEALY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYEBarack Obama and John McCain ripped into each other on Thursday over how many houses, fireplaces and even wine cellars they own, using allusions to net worth to deride each other while portraying themselves as able helmsmen for a faltering economy.
With both candidates convinced that financially pinched voters might hold the electoral key in November — especially in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania — Senators Obama and McCain are taking new, vivid steps to empathize with struggling middle-class and working-class Americans, a tricky task given their own personal wealth.
In a new television advertisement and at an event in Virginia on Thursday, Mr. Obama seized on new comments by Mr. McCain, made a day earlier, expressing uncertainty about the number of homes he owned. (Eight, with his wife, Obama aides said; four, McCain aides said.) Obama advisers cast the McCain remark as politically explosive, contrasting it with the mortgage foreclosure crisis that has upended the American dream of owning even one home.
The McCain camp swiftly countered with its own advertisement and condemnations, noting that Mr. Obama owns a “mansion” — a disputable characterization — with four fireplaces in Chicago, and reviving questions about his land deal with Antoin Rezko, a businessman who was convicted in June on fraud and corruption charges.
The exchange highlighted how, as economic issues increasingly dominate the campaign, the two presumptive presidential nominees are still searching for ways to connect with voters on the economy. Mr. Obama sometimes seems professorial in response to personal problems, while Mr. McCain seemed more than half-serious on Saturday when he defined “rich” as having $5 million or more.
“It’s now clear that the economy will be the tipping point in this election,” said Jack F. Kemp, the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1996 and a former housing secretary, “and the candidate who has the best answer to getting America growing again without inflation is going to tap the winning segment of this electorate.
“I like John’s ideas, but he has more to do in terms of making his case and connecting with voters on the economy.”
For all the candidates’ detailed position papers, many undecided taxpayers and homeowners appear to be looking at the candidates themselves, as well as their speeches, body language and stagecraft, in hopes of making a visceral identification.
Part of the challenge for both men is that they have campaigned largely on character traits: Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, as a war hero who stuck with the troop surge in Iraq in spite of criticism, and Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, as a change agent who would unite voters with a hopeful message.
“Obama has the better set of policies,” said Robert E. Rubin, a former secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. “But has he effectively conveyed those policies in a way that votes will understand? That’s the challenge for his campaign.”
And one way for each to connect with voters is to suggest his opponent’s own lack of understanding of the economic struggles facing Americans, which was underscored by the exchanges on Thursday.
Mr. Obama became a millionaire by writing books, and he lost primaries this spring in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania to a rival who appealed to voters with a can-do political platform on pocketbook issues, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Mr. McCain, meanwhile, overcame a primary challenge from former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a wealthy executive who also focused on the economy.
“Neither Obama nor McCain owns the economy as an issue because they’ve never focused on it, really, in ways that working-class families would identify with,” said Jimmy Siegel, who helped create political advertisements for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. “Obama has always been about hope and change, in a broad sense, while McCain has always been about foreign policy and experience.”
Perhaps taking his cue from the Clinton campaign’s successes, Mr. Obama is encouraging voters to start to share with him their stories of personal hardship. And he is taking more opportunities to emphasize his own understanding of hardship with them, although it does not always come easy.
At a town-hall-style meeting on Thursday in Chester, Va., Mr. Obama was asked what he would do for poor people. He began with a lengthy explication about how poor people do not hate the rich, they simply want to join the middle class. He described parts of his economic plan, which he said would put more money in their pockets. He described the life of Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, who grew up poor on the South Side of Chicago. It was only then, several minutes into his answer, that Mr. Obama might have connected more by referring to his own life.
“My mother was on food stamps for a while,” he said. “It wasn’t because she was lazy. It’s because she was a single mom who was working and going to school at the same time, trying to raise two kids, trying to make a better life for herself and her family.”
The point, he told his listeners, was this: “Don’t be fooled by all this talk about class warfare. We just want to make the economy fair so that everybody’s got a chance, not just some people.”
Mr. McCain has focused on offshore oil drilling and broad tax relief as steps to directly assist the greatest number of working Americans, by lowering taxes and, his campaign hopes, both gas prices and home foreclosures. McCain aides say the candidate will strongly push his economic program in the weeks to come, including during the Democratic National Convention next week.
The exact number of McCain family homes was difficult to pin down on Thursday, as the issue would not go away after it was raised in an interview with Politico the day before.
McCain aides said the family had four residences: a ranch in Sedona, Ariz.; a condo in Phoenix; a condo in Northern Virginia; and a condo in San Diego that is made up of two adjoining properties. The family trust of Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, controls other properties that relatives use as homes. The Obama campaign said that it based its figure of eight on the number of properties it says Mrs. McCain, and in some cases Mr. McCain, appear to own.
The Obama home in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, meanwhile, does have four fireplaces and a wine cellar.
Michael Cooper contributed reporting.
