Obama and McCain Spar From Victory Podiums

Alex Frangos reports from Alexandria, Va., on the presidential race.

The results were barely in tonight and the two sweepers, Barack Obama and John McCain began to rhetorically lock horns in a preview of the possible November match-up.

Obama, riding high on his eight contest winning streak, turned his words to the likely Republican nominee. “We honor his service to our nation. But his priorities don’t address the real problems of the American people, because they are bound to the failed policies of the past,” he said tonight at a rally in Madison, Wis. Alluding to Mr. McCain’s support of President Bush’s policies on the Iraq War and tax cuts, he said “George Bush won’t be on the ballot this November … the Bush-Cheney war, the Bush-Cheney tax cuts, will be on the ballot.”

McCain’s victory speech had some tart rejoinders aimed at Obama’s campaign themes.

“They will promise a new approach to governing, but offer only the policies of a political orthodoxy that insists the solution to government’s failures is to simply make it bigger,” McCain said.

Then he took a long verbal tour of Obama’s signature theme.

“Hope, my friends, is a powerful thing,” McCain said, “I have seen men’s hopes tested in hard and cruel ways that few will ever experience.”

He went on: “To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.”