Beyond the Dome

John McCain’s campaign is really trying hard to kill the notion that Barack Obama has worked across the aisle in the Senate. Today, his campaign sent out a memo that raises the bar even higher.

The standard now, according to the McCain campaign, is whether Obama has ever “bucked the party line to lead on an issue of national importance.”

“He has never been a part of a bipartisan group that came together to solve a controversial issue. He has never put his career on the line for a cause greater than himself,” Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to the McCain campaign, said in the memo.

It’s a clever way to define the test in a way that ensures that Obama can’t pass it, and McCain can. It was McCain, after all, who got the campaign finance overhaul legislation signed into law in 2002, against heavy opposition from President Bush and his own leadership. It was McCain who co-chaired the “Gang of 14,” the Senate centrists who prevented a showdown over judicial filibusters in 2005. And it was McCain who forced Bush to sign the 2005 torture ban into law, which he clearly didn’t want to do.

With Obama, it’s much harder to find examples where he both “bucked the party line” and led on “an issue of national importance.” So in the coming months, you can expect the Obama campaign to lean heavily on his role in the passage of the 2007 ethics overhaul. That was the centerpiece of the campaign’s response to the McCain memo today, and it’s the only example that really gets beyond the relatively non-controversial work he has done in the rest of his brief Senate career.

Obama was one of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hand-picked leaders of the ethics effort (the other was Russ Feingold of Wisconsin), so you could argue he wasn’t really bucking the party leadership. But government watchdog groups say Obama and Feingold did put pressure on Reid by putting together a package of proposals to make the bill more ambitious than it would have been otherwise.

And Obama did sponsor one provision, requiring lobbyists to disclose the “bundling” of contributions they collect for campaigns, that got him into a scrap with Charles E. Schumer of New York, the vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Conference and chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Schumer — who later supported Hillary Rodham Clinton against Obama in the primaries — is no wallflower, so that episode could count as bucking the party leadership.

Still, it will be hard for Obama to match McCain if the contest is defined as who has been the bigger rebel against the party line. As I argued in a January piece on Obama and Clinton’s Senate records, neither one has taken as many risks in their Senate career as McCain has.

But since those risks also include plenty of votes to continue the Iraq war, it’s probably not a good idea for McCain to rely too much on his Senate record to win the election for him.