The collapse of Lehman Brothers and government buyout of AIG drastically changed the nature of the campaign for both Obama and McCain. The Democratic nominee enjoyed a boost in the polls due to McCain's fumbling of the crisis. Obama blasted the Republican nominee for saying that "the fundamentals [of the economy] are strong," just hours before the upheval in the markets. In response to the Bush Adminstration's $700 billion plan to buy up bad securities from Wall Street, Obama said that it must not be a "blank check," and should include provisions for tighter regulation of the market, support for international recovery, and have a focus on Main Street as well as Wall Street. The Senator from Illinois has been spending time in North Carolina, a state historically Republican, but which is predicted to be a close contest in this election.
In other news, Vice Presidential running mate Joe Biden warned Obama not to "fool with my Beretta" as he was campaigning in Virginia.
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It is interesting to see how President Bush has now made a larger entry into the campaign as an outside factor. It is now a competition for who can disagree more strongly with Mr. Bush. Yet the American public seems to tie the economic struggles of the nation with the Republican Party, and therefore Sen. McCain is willing to drop everything in order to act strongly on this issue. However, Sen. Obama is able to be skeptical of the plan because he is benefiting in the polls from economic instability. It is interesting that Sen. Obama states he does not support a "blank check" but has not yet outlined his own plan.
It seems that the republicans are attempting to turn the economic situation around on the democrats. Everything Sarah Palin has said suggests that McCain is working to give our economy a boost while Obama is doing nothing but spewing negativity about the subject. Naturally this would be the republican response but it will be interesting to see how the American people will respond to this issue.
About a month ago, the New York Times magazine published a great article on "Obamanomics," (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24Obamanomics-t.html) in what I found to be the most sound and detailed description on Obama's economic principles yet.
As the article mentions, "John McCain’s economic vision amounts to a slightly altered version of Republican orthodoxy, with tax cuts at the core. Sen. Obama, on the other hand, has more-detailed proposals but a less obvious ideology."
The article makes for an interesting read into the sometimes hard to pinpoint economic views of Sen. Obama.
In regard to the post, perhaps Obama's reserved judgment during the bailout crisis paid off after all. With Sen. McCain taking the "man of action" approach, swooning in to Washington and pledging that passage would occur, some credibility and confidence was definitely lost in the failure of the bill to pass on Monday. We will have to wait for the House vote Friday to see what happens with the bill, and how the two candidates react afterwards.
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