Preserving attribute whitespace

Disclaimer: the following is a sin against XML. That's why I'm trying to change it with XSLT :)

My XML currently looks like this:

<root>
    <object name="blarg" property1="shablarg" property2="werg".../>
    <object name="yetanotherobject" .../>
</root>

Yes, I'm putting all the textual data in attributes. I'm hoping XSLT can save me; I want to move toward something like this:

<root>
    <object>
        <name>blarg</name>
        <property1>shablarg</name>
        ...
    </object>
    <object>
        ...
    </object>
</root>

I've actually got all of this working so far, with the exception that my sins against XML have been more... exceptional. Some of the tags look like this:

<object description = "This is the first line

This is the third line.  That second line full of whitespace is meaningful"/>

I'm using xsltproc under linux, but it doesn't seem to have any options to preserve whitespace. I've attempted to use xsl:preserve-space and xml:space="preserve" to no avail. Every option I've found seems to apply to keeping whitespace within the elements themselves, but not the attributes. Every single time, the above gets changed to:

This is the first line This is the third line.  That second line full of whitespace is meaningful

So the question is, can I preserve the attribute whitespace?