Never before in the 48-year history of presidential debates has a candidate begun his substantive remarks, as Obama did, by starkly declaring, “I think everybody knows now we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” Yet as a first-term senator — a candidate whose meteoric rise has been fueled by his opposition to the Iraq war, his charisma and his life story — Obama did a masterly job of coming across as the candidate of economic reassurance.
Bill Clinton — who overwhelmed George H.W. Bush in the first town-meeting debate in 1992 — was the unquestioned master at feeling (or feigning) the pain of an individual voter. But Obama and McCain had the much more difficult challenge of feeling the pain of an entire economy. In one of his strongest moments — even though it was unlikely to make the morning-after highlight reels — Obama explained the credit crunch in a way that even the most economically unsophisticated voter could understand:
“The credit markets are frozen up and what that means … is that small businesses and some large business just can’t get loans. If they can’t get a loan, that means that they can’t make payroll … If you imagine just one company trying to deal with that, now imagine a million companies all across the country.”
Looking at the debate purely in political terms obscures the reality that much of what both candidates are saying about the economy is only tangentially connected to the worldwide financial crisis. Middle-class tax cuts, Obama’s favorite balm, would not lift America out of a deep recession or do much to restore retirement accounts devastated by the stock-market dive. McCain was even further off the mark with his proposal for an “across-the-board freeze” on government spending — defense, of course, excluded. McCain’s green-eyeshade approach to economic calamity suggests that he lives in an alternative universe where the economic-stimulus lessons of John Maynard Keynes have never been demonstrated.
I actually did not watch this debate, so I am depending on what I’ve read. This article sums up about how I thought it would go though. I’ve copied out a few choice paragraphs from the article.
