Where's the Fire?

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Obama with aides David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett and wife Michelle before a stop in Boardman, Ohio.

Callie Shell / Aurora for TIME

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But Obama doesn't do spontaneous combustion. And he's keenly aware of the deeper danger of fire for America's first black presidential nominee. Over the past 19 months, he's been attacked as a naive novice, an empty suit, a tax-and-spend liberal, an arugula-grazing élitist and a corrupt ward heeler, but the attacks that nearly derailed him involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, attacks designed to portray Obama as an angry black man. White America has embraced unthreatening African Americans like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith and Colin Powell, but this is still a majority-white country, and Obama does not want to be stereotyped as a race man like Malcolm X. In a media climate in which "working class" and "small town" and "ordinary" voters still mean white voters, angry white candidates can be "populists," but angry black candidates get tagged as "militants." Obama has no interest in trying to find out whether America is ready for an angry black man. He's more likely to try to send negative messages with humor, as he does in a new ad that mocks McCain's unfamiliarity with e-mail while featuring a Rubik's Cube, a prehistoric cell phone and other relics of 1982, the year of McCain's arrival in Congress. Campaign treasurer Martin Nesbitt says Obama is keenly aware of the pressure to "strike back and be meaner; fight fire with fire," but the candidate is not swayed by it. "He lets all the noise go on," Nesbitt says.

Obama's aides are sensitive about his brand; they don't want to undercut his claim to represent a new kind of politics. That's why they don't use the word Republican in ads; they think voters are tired of partisan attacks. And that's why they initially asked Democratic groups not to air any independent ads on Obama's behalf; they wanted to control the brand themselves. But the Service Employees International Union recently aired an anti-McCain ad, and other groups are poised to follow suit. Earlier polls had produced "reckless overconfidence on the part of our donors," one Democratic operative said, but that overconfidence is gone.

As the candidates prepare for their first debate Sept. 26, the Obama camp remains confident it can win an argument about who can deliver change. As Plouffe puts it: "No matter how many times McCain and Palin use the word change or try to reinvent their own records, one thing stays the same: when it comes to the economy, education, Iraq or the special-interest stranglehold on Washington, they are both stubborn defenders of the past eight years, and they both promise more of the same."

It's a powerful argument in a Democratic year. It's the argument Obama has been making for months. But it's not yet a winning argument.