The press is working hard to figure out where McCain is going, but he seems to be having a hard time getting his economic message straight. In the NY Times, for instance, Michael Cooper noted that:
On Monday morning, as the financial system absorbed one of its biggest shocks in generations, Senator John McCain said, as he had many times before, that he believed the fundamentals of the economy were "strong."
Hours later he backpedaled, explaining that he had meant that American workers, whom he described as the backbone of the economy, were productive and resilient. By Tuesday he was calling the economic situation "a total crisis" and denouncing "greed" on Wall Street and in Washington.
As Cooper pointed out he had struck a discordant note on "the very issue on which he can least afford to stumble."
After 16 speeches in which he stated that the fundamentals of our economy were strong, he then came back to say that those fundamentals were actually defined as "the American worker>," in a way challenging Obama to say that those fundamentals were not sound.
Then there was the Carly Fiorina matter, giving McCain's command of the economic situation a kick in the teeth. Fiorina mad the statement to two television interviewers that "neither member of the Republican ticket would be capable of running a company" as CEO (Oh, she said Obama or Biden couldn't either.) As CNN reported:
"Carly will now disappear," this source said. "Senator McCain was furious." Asked to define "disappear," this source said, adding that she would be off TV for a while - but remain at the Republican National Committee and keep her role as head of the party's joint fundraising committee with the McCain campaign.
Fiorina was booked for several TV interviews over the next few days, including one on CNN. Those interviews have been canceled.
And, of course, all this brought recalls in the September press of the statement McCain had made in January (this from the Boston Globe):
Like Mike Huckabee, who joked recently that he "may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night," McCain suggested to reporters Monday that American consumer culture offered a short cut to expertise. "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," McCain said. "I've got Greenspan's book."
Getting back to the NY Times Article,
By the end of the day, the campaign had gone back on offense. Here in Vienna, outside Youngstown, Mr. McCain noted at a joint rally with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, that Mr. Obama had originally chosen a former head of the recently bailed-out Fannie Mae to lead his vice-presidential search (though the head of Mr. McCain’s search committee was himself a past lobbyist for Fannie Mae).
And Ms. Palin said that Mr. Obama’s "tax plans really would kill jobs and hurt small businesses and make even today’s bad economy look like the good old days."
Frankly, I think they are desperate.
Under The LobsterScope