WASHINGTON – If the last week is an indication, the White House fight between Barack Obama and John McCain won’t be the genteel, highbrow contest each promised earlier.

Obama is portraying the Republican as a George W. Bush clone who offers endless war and economic stagnation.

McCain – borrowing from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s playbook, just as some Democrats feared he would – hammered the theme of experience, figuring his extra decades on the national stage will give him more traction than Clinton got with that line of attack.

These early salvos could foreshadow a testy summer as the candidates try to soften up and define each other. At the least, it reflected the imperative to deny the other guy a free ride in the campaign’s warm-up stage.

The vitriol peaked when Obama criticized McCain’s opposition to expanding education benefits for veterans. “I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in opposition to this GI bill. I can’t believe why he believes it is too generous to our veterans,” the Democrat said on the Senate floor.

From California, the Republican – a former Navy pilot and prisoner of war -called it a “cheap shot.” He and other critics worried that the new veterans benefit would be so generous, it would hurt re-enlistment rates. And McCain rejected a lecture from someone “who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform” – his first jab about Obama’s lack of military service, underscoring a key contrast that he’s sure to exploit in coming months.

Obama hit back in unusually sharp terms. “These endless diatribes and schoolyard taunts from the McCain campaign do nothing to advance the debate about what matters to the American people,” he said.

Despite huge losses this month in West Virginia and Kentucky, Obama is edging close to locking up his nomination. That has emboldened him to look past Clinton, and keep his focus on McCain.

One goal was to chip away at the Republican’s long-cultivated image as a reformer, even as McCain began enforcing a strict no-lobbyist policy in his campaign. A half-dozen top aides were swept out, including former Texas congressman Tom Loeffler, who had helped the campaign survive last summer. But his firm has collected $15 million from Saudi Arabia to lobby Congress – a revelation that didn’t sound great as gasoline hit $4 per gallon.

Housecleaning is fine, Obama said, but McCain fought a decade ago to bar registered lobbyists from campaigns in the first place.

“John McCain then would be pretty disappointed in John McCain now,” he taunted at a rally, “because he hired some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his campaign.”

But “experience” has emerged as McCain’s central argument – and because he’s talking to the full electorate, not just Democrats, it might work better for him than it did for Clinton.

Test-marketing

“Senator Clinton was test-marketing general election themes against Obama but with a poor control group,” said GOP strategist Tucker Eskew, an adviser to the 2004 Bush campaign. “She ran against him on experience, and she doesn’t have that much.”

Bush touched off the latest sparring. Speaking to Israeli lawmakers, he derided any notion of reaching out diplomatically to terror groups. He likened that to “appeasement” of Hitler. That was widely seen as a shot at Obama, who says he is willing to meet with any number of U.S. adversaries that the president, Clinton, McCain and others say they would shun, including Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

McCain then spent the week calling Obama’s stance wrongheaded and dangerously naive. To even consider a meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he said Monday in Chicago, “betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess.”

He tailored the theme to a Cuban-American crowd in Miami a day later, arguing that to meet with Raul Castro would send the “worst possible signal” to dictators: the U.S. will blink, no fundamental reform required.

Obama accused his rival of twisting his views. He wasn’t about to “invite Castro over for tea,” he said, emphasizing that adversaries would get a sit-down only after “sufficient preparations” by lower-level diplomats.

Whoever won the round, the Democrat had spent the time on McCain turf.

And the exchange had a certain deja vu quality, echoing those 3 a.m. crisis call ads Clinton used to stir anxiety about Obama in Texas and Ohio.

Now, the playing field has morphed.

In the intraparty fight, Obama could blunt the attack by pointing to Clinton’s vote to authorize war in Iraq; for many Democrats, his judgment on Iraq trumped her superior experience.

The McCain target audience is Republicans and swing voters, many of whom credit Mr. McCain’s outspoken criticism of how the Iraq war was prosecuted.

But Bob Mulholland, a top Democratic strategist in California, called the experience argument a “diversionary tactic” that won’t work for McCain.

For one thing, he said, the Democratic victor will, by definition, emerge as a “very credible” presidential contender. For another, the war, sagging economy and deeply unpopular president put Republicans in a tough spot for the fall.

And he all but dared Republicans to dust off the 3 a.m. crisis call motif.

“The reason we’re getting calls at 3 a.m. is because of the Bush-McCain foreign policies over the last seven years,” Mulholland said, adding, “Would the American people rather have Bush’s ally, at the age of 72, trying to wake up to take that call?”