By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry blasted presumed Republican presidential nominee John McCain for using video clips of Democrats’ past praise of McCain in a web-only campaign commercial released Thursday morning.

Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, called the Arizona senator “unrecognizable” and said he had “changed overnight.”

In painting McCain as a maverick, the ad features a series of Democrats — Kerry, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Sen. Russell Feingold and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. — talking up the Republican nominee as a bipartisan deal-maker and all-around good guy.

Daschle: “He can work with Democrats on key issues.”

Biden: “I would be honored to run with or against John McCain .”

Kerry: “He is a courageous, patriotic American who stands up for what he believes.”

Dean: “Nobody has to guess at what he’s thinking,”

Feingold: “I love John McCain . He’s a great guy.”

Then the ad shows Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama testifying before a Senate committee that the “right approach” to climate change legislation is one that begins with a plan offered by McCain and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman , I-Conn.

It closes with Obama’s primary rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton , D-N.Y., saying “I know that Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House, and Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002” — a reference to the speech Obama delivered against the Iraq war when he was a state senator in Illinois.

Kerry, who reportedly thought about asking McCain to join his ticket in 2004, was the first Democrat to unload on McCain, likening the ad to one the Republican has run comparing Obama’s celebrity to the fame of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

“The McCain campaign is determined to give their Paris Hilton ad a run for its money in the desperation department, and they’ve succeeded only in shining a light on the fact that the John McCain of today is unrecognizable from the John McCain of just a couple years ago,” Kerry said in a statement released by his office. “The real question is what happened to the John McCain we used to know and why he changed overnight into a George Bush nominee with a Karl Rove campaign.”

While most of the video clips in the ad are taken from before the presidential election season, Obama’s comments were made less than two weeks before his official campaign kickoff and Clinton’s were from March of this year.