When John McCain challenged Barack Obama's campaign strategy of running against George W. Bush, I believe that Obama missed a golden opportunity to end this race decisively.
Here's McCain's challenge:
MCCAIN: Yes. Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.
And further down the transcript, Obama's response:
OBAMA: So the fact of the matter is that if I occasionally have mistaken your policies for George Bush's policies, it's because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people, on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities, you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush.
What the good Senator from Illinois should have said was this: "I am not running against President Bush. Rather, I am running against a quarter century of Republican supply side tax and regulatory policies that have resulted in the worst economic crisis in our nation since the Great Depression. And Senator McCain has been a champion of that trickle-down economic theory throughout his quarter-century in Washington. Supply-side theory has failed miserably in every respect. It is time to throw off the failed economic policies of the past, not just during the past eight years, but for more than twenty-five years."
That is the message that Senator Obama needs to drive home in the next 20 days. He needs to make clear the proposition that the current economic crisis is not the result of several isolated pieces of legislation, but is the failure of an economic theory that another President Bush labeled "voodoo economics."