McCain's choice alters campaign

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama began recalibrating their strategies for the presidential campaign — and reconsidering some of their basic assumptions about which states and voters were in play — in a contest recast by McCain's unexpected selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.

In the days after McCain announced his decision, catching almost everyone but his inner circle by surprise, both sides were trying to gauge the risks and opportunities of having a young, relatively inexperienced, socially conservative woman on the Republican ticket.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic Party had prepared advertisements and lines of attacks directed at the two men who had been most prominently mentioned as vice-presidential possibilities for McCain — Mitt Romney and Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota — but had not considered Palin a likely enough choice to do the same for her. A new advertisement linking President Bush to McCain was quickly put together, but it contained only a fleeting mention of Palin.

That tentativeness reflected what Obama's advisers said was their struggle to figure out how to challenge the credentials and the ideology of a woman whose candidacy could be embraced by many women as a historic milestone. Once formally nominated at the Republican convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul this week, Palin, who was elected governor two years ago, will be the second woman chosen by a major party as a vice-presidential candidate.

Obama's campaign does not plan to go directly after Palin in the days ahead. Instead, it is planning to increase its attacks on McCain for his opposition to pay equity legislation and abortion rights — two issues of paramount concern to many women — as it tries to head off his effort to use Palin to draw Democratic and independent women who had supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

McCain's advisers said that rallying wavering women would be one of Palin's main jobs in the weeks ahead. They said her campaign schedule would take her to areas in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania where there were pockets of women who had supported Clinton in the primaries.

At the same time, they suggested, Palin would also be given the task of appealing to evangelical voters, who have long been unenthusiastic about McCain. In many ways, the choice of Palin may prove to have been as much an effort to drive up turnout among the Republican base as it was a move to compete for women.

"We had a solid Republican and evangelical base," said Charlie Black, a senior adviser to McCain. "But now it's going to be very intense."