The picture of John McCain's economic incompetence is starting to emerge for all but the most knee-jerk ideological voters. And for a growing number of Americans, the picture isn't pretty.
While the Obama campaign has been brilliant in tying McCain to the policies of George Bush and have forced McCain on his heels by reintroducing the Keating Five scandal, the media has been reluctant to accept the relevance of these two issues.
However, there is a very clear link between McCain's support for Bush's policies and the role in the Keating Five. It's his judgment on economic issues and who he listens to for advice. And I'm crossing my fingers that Barack Obama makes that connection crystal clear for undecided voters tonight by adding the last puzzle piece in the case against John McCain.
Tonight I want to hear Barack Obama tell American about McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm and explain why he's the perfect example of all that is wrong with our economic policies and all that is wrong with John McCain.
I don't need to educate anyone here about Phil Gramm's role in deregulating government oversight of the energy industry which gave us the Enron scandal. I don't need to point out to this community that Phil Gramm's wife sat on the Enron board and benefited financially from pyramid scheme whose spectacular collapse destroyed the balance sheets of so many pension funds and 401K's.
I don't need to remind Kossacks that it was Phil Gramm who slipped in a bill deregulating the banking and insurance industry that jump started the real estate boom which has recently burst into families and threatens the global economy.
And everyone here knows that this summer, while the markets started to wake up to the fact that the party was over and our economic future was looking bleak, it was Phil Gramm who called us a "nation of whiners".
The case against Phil Gramm and his role in writing John McCain's economic policies are well-known here. But regular Americans "aka Joe Six Packs" are just waking up to the political consequences of the last 8 years of Bush policies and are disgusted by what they see. Many are seeing their retirement money being sucked up by the rich who have exploited regulatory loopholes. And the man who supported exploitable regulatory loopholes better than anyone else, and whom John McCain exhibited even more poor judgment to turn to for economic advice, is Phil Gramm.
While the McCain campaign is betting on the fact that Americans are too stupid to put the Keating Five scandal and our current economic crisis together, there is one man links them together perfectly- Phil Gramm. And so far his name has gone largely unmentioned by Obama and his surrogates, but will Obama use tonight's event to add that last puzzle piece to the picture of John McCain's fiscal incompetence that has been emerging in the last few weeks?
I hope so.