Issue by issue Wednesday in separating Barack Obama from John McCain in the presidential sweepstakes, Sen. Jay Rockefeller sounded like the opening lines of “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Obama is a vocal friend of clean coal technology. McCain is silent.

Obama is concerned with a wide spectrum of issues that affect the struggling working class. McCain seems focused almost exclusively on the military.

Obama wants to hit Big Oil with a windfall profits tax and give American motorists a $1,000 check to help with high gas costs. Again, McCain is silent on relief at the pumps.

“That’s what this campaign is all about,” Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in a conference call when asked if the Democratic nominee can help the struggling middle class.

For the 47 million uninsured Americans, McCain prefers to hand out inadequate vouchers that mean they won’t get sufficient health coverage, the senator said from the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

“Obama’s plan is specific and detailed,” he said before delivering a speech Wednesday evening at the convention hall.

“He wants universal health care. He won’t get it all the first year. He wants to do the Children’s Health Insurance Program. That’s 11 million children. Obama is going to make his case why he’s good for West Virginia working families. McCain is going to make his case why he’s bad.”

Rockefeller portrayed Obama as openly supportive of clean coal technology, saying it dovetails with efforts to make the nation greener in response to global warming.

Obama’s home state of Illinois has a coals-to-liquids plant and the senator has alluded to the concept in campaign speeches, the senator said.

“Obviously, he’s very much focused on global warming,” Rockefeller said. “He should be. But one of the ways to solve the problem is through a really major effort in clean coal technology.

“That’s 250 to 400 years of solving many of our energy problems and making us energy independent. And that doesn’t exclude anything — windmills, the hybrid cars, conservation, everything else. You have to do it all. But clean coal has to be a part of it. That takes research and money. McCain has said nothing about it. Obama and I are talking vigorously about it. I think we’ll end up prevailing on that.”

On fighting terrorism, the differences are even sharper, Rockefeller said.

“McCain looks through the world through cold war glasses,” he said. “Barack looks at it very clearly. His mission is very clear.”

In remarks for his convention speech, Rockefeller imparted a stinging rebuke of President Bush’s war, asking, “Shouldn’t we have captured Osama bin Laden by now?”

While Hillary Clinton decisioned Obama handily in the May primary, Rockefeller said he believes the Illinois senator can capture West Virginia, noting he trails McCain here by a mere 8 points and adding there is a world of difference between the two and that will become apparent when voters learn more about the two rivals.

“John McCain stands against so much of what West Virginia needs,” he said.

“He’s voted 27 times against veterans health care. He voted against the G.I. bill for veterans, which he himself took advantage of, I think. He’s against Medicare. He’s against CHIP. He’s for making permanent all the tax cuts Bush put in place. Trillions and trillions of dollars. He doesn’t even have a plan really to get out of Iraq. He’s attached himself to Bush.”

Overall, Rockefeller opined, the most compelling quality of Obama is his sense of “intuitive judgment.”

“He’s a very, very effective senator,” Rockefeller said.

“He has experience. Most important, he has judgment. That’s my criteria. That’s the way I come down on people. I think he has a natural instinct toward judgment. He has an open mind. He’s so smart that he’s not threatened to be told different ideas. He absorbs. And I think he’ll make a great president.”

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