For All the Marbles

On a normal day, we'd all be buzzing about the McCain adviser's tone-deaf claim that his man practically invented the BlackBerry.

But this is not a normal day, or a normal week. The domino-like collapse of one Wall Street institution after the next -- Bear, Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, Merrill, and now the huge bailout of AIG -- has grabbed our collective attention, along with the whack upside the head of a one-day, 500-point plunge in the Dow.

I've been amused watching John McCain and Sarah Palin say "Washington" was asleep at the switch in this financial crisis. Both are presumably familiar with who's been in charge of the White House the past eight years.

Don't get me wrong -- I think both parties bear responsibility for the mess. Both parties allowed a shadow banking system to develop that created all these exotic mortgage instruments that made a lot of people a lot of money but avoided the regulatory constraints placed on banks. Both parties, pressured by lobbyists, failed to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac despite years of warnings. But a president must take the lead on some issues, and this has been a fundamentally deregulatory administration headed by a man who wanted to push retirees to put some of their Social Security savings into the stock market. (Remember when Enron was going to lead to lasting reform?)

On balance, then, the collapse on Wall Street should favor Obama, if only because a throw-the-bums-out message should be simpler. But he has had trouble driving an economic message all year. Much of the country doesn't know Obama wants to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. Much of the country doesn't know what he means by "change." He's got lots of proposals and position papers but no story, no narrative, no slogan to help him connect to working-class voters.

I caught Obama yesterday saying he had called for "a new, 21st-century regulatory framework." Zzzz. That's not lunchbucket language. McCain's out there talking about "greed." Obama needs to find a way to punch it up.

But if Obama constantly attacks McCain for calling the economy "fundamentally sound," as the Illinois senator does in a new ad (critiqued here), he runs the risk of sounding too pessimistic.

We're now plunging into a blame-game debate, though at least the subject is far more important than lipstick or the tanning bed that Palin had installed in the governor's mansion.

"With the Wall Street crisis deepening, the major presidential candidates took divergent approaches in their appeals to anxious voters yesterday," the Boston Globe reports, "with John McCain casting himself as an outspoken populist outraged at corporate greed and Barack Obama hammering what he called a Republican-led climate of deregulation that McCain championed."

A NYT analysis says that McCain's "record on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party's embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline . . .

"Mr. Obama set out his general approach to financial regulation in March, calling for regulating investment banks, mortgage brokers and hedge funds much as commercial banks are. And he would streamline the overlapping regulatory agencies and create a commission to monitor threats to the financial system and report to the White House and Congress.

"On Wall Street's Republican-friendly turf, Mr. Obama has outraised Mr. McCain. He has received $9.9 million from individuals associated with the securities and investment industry, $3 million more than Mr. McCain."