Everyone (including me) seems to agree that the candidate that "connects" with the average voter on the economy and convinces them their solution for its problems are correct will runaway with this election.
John McCain, with his reputation as a maverick (once debatably true, not even close nowadays) and his deathbed conversion to regulator is running around saying he's going to tweak the system: fire his friend and philosophical soul mate, the SEC chairman, get rid of "greed" on Wall St (what a joke! There'd be no one left if he succeeded), add a regulation here or there, and apply some other miscellaneous band-aids.
What John McCain has not done, and could never do, is argue for fundamental change in our reigning economic philosophy, the one that has gripped this country for decades, defined the "norm" and kept the Republicans in power: Voodoo Economics (aka Reaganomics) with its belief in unruled markets, unlimited deficits, unpatriotic tax cuts for the rich and unproven, trickle down benefits for everyone else.
It's clear from his New Mexico speech yesterday, that Obama is starting to make the case for something fundamentally different: Obama: "The last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed". While he's getting better at talking about how his change is not just one at the margins like McCain advocates, Obama still has a way to go to get to a level of understandability that any American can relate to. And gut level understandability, when combined with the bad economy and fear of what might happen next (or could have happened ... imagine if Social Security had been privatized like McCain wanted) is what will put the final nail in the Reagonmics coffin. If played correctly by Obama, he has a chance to discredit the Republicans on the economy as badly as the Neocons now are on foreign policy ... for now and long into the future.
It is in that spirit that I offer the following two, better-than-New-Mexico ways to get the idea across. First, there's Rep Barney Frank, Chairman of the Senate Financial Services Committee, who did a pretty good job in only 100 seconds:
A true understanding of the free market and of capitalism understands the role for regulation and if you do not have appropriate regulation, if you do not have a good set of rules within which the activity can be conducted you get the kind of problems you have now. It's an irony, by totally abstaining or virtually totally abstaining from any kind of involvement in the market they created a situation in which they are now more deeply engaged in the market in an financial entanglement with the market than the liberals ever wanted to be.
But I think a reader to TPM, really nailed it:
The Democrats -- the Obama campaign in particular -- have not driven home their fundamental differences on how they view the role and operation of the financial markets, and how, at this point, implementation of one point of view over another is becoming the difference between the U.S. sliding downward into 2nd-world economic status or the dollar and U.S. financial markets maintaining their leading role around the world.
One metaphor the Democrats don't use, that I think of over and over when I hear Obama speak about the need for regulation: the markets operate like team sports -- like say, a football game. Team sports don't operate well without referees, and that's exactly what's happened under the Republicans.
They can blame Clinton all they want -- the fact is, the Republicans under leadership of such brain trusts as Phil Gramm have methodically removed the referees from the games, and look what's happened. One of the primary reasons investors shy away from putting money into third world countries is an ABSENCE OF REGULATION.
Why doesn't Obama encapsulate his ideas in this way? Democrats believe in free markets, but free markets need rules and referees, just like a football game does, otherwise chaos and destruction.
As an example, see how effectively the referee notion works in practice as Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) uses it:
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