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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Economy likely to define stretch run

Challenges differ for Obama, McCain

By Dan Balz and Robert Barnes Washington Post

WASHINGTON – Monday’s meltdown on Wall Street brought the economy roaring back to the center of the presidential campaign, and the question for the final seven weeks of the general-election campaign is whether Barack Obama or John McCain can convince voters that he is capable of leading the country out of the morass.

McCain faces the bigger challenge. As the Republican, he must answer for what has happened on President Bush’s watch and offer a plausible explanation for why his administration would be genuinely different. Obama already is attacking him as ill-equipped to deal with the financial crisis and has aggressively moved to tie a future McCain administration to a lobbyist-dominated Washington culture.

Obama’s challenge is different. He begins with the reality that Democrats are seen as the party more trusted to deal with the economy. Despite that, he has struggled to develop a compelling economic message. Where he remains suspect is on the strength of his leadership and his ability to connect with working- and middle-class voters. McCain is playing on those qualms in his counterattacks.

Even before Monday’s bad news, the economy was the top issue on voters’ minds. But over the past two weeks, other issues – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin being the most obvious – have dominated the political discussion. That phase of the campaign may have ended.

The debate now will probably shift back to fundamentals. Whom will voters trust to lead the country out of this problem and whom do they believe has a credible plan for doing so? What matters now is how McCain and Obama respond to the latest evidence of an economy still struggling to overcome the damage inflicted by the real estate and home mortgage crises.

Neither has truly won the confidence of voters, and Monday neither offered fresh ideas about how to deal with what has become a mess of huge proportions.

By McCain’s own admission, the economy is not his natural turf, and his comments Monday seemed less than sure-footed. At his first event of the day, he acknowledged that the economy is in difficult straits and promised to shake up Washington and Wall Street. But he also said he still thinks “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

The Obama campaign pounced on those words, saying they showed McCain to be “disturbingly out of touch” with the reality that everyday Americans face. At a rally in Grand Junction, Colo., Obama wondered: “What economy are you talking about?” The comments also seemed at odds with McCain’s new television commercial that declares an economic crisis.

By the time the Republican nominee had made the short flight to Orlando for a town hall meeting, his campaign had e-mailed reporters new remarks he would deliver. They seemed a 180-degree turn. If McCain’s earlier comments had seemed designed to reassure, his new ones were dire. “The American economy is in a crisis – in a crisis,” he repeated.

Obama has been under pressure from Democrats, nervous about McCain’s post-convention rise in the polls, to refocus his message on the economy. Campaigning in Colorado, he described the recent series of events as “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression” and accused Washington and Wall Street of failures.

“I certainly don’t fault Sen. McCain for these problems,” he said. “But I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It’s the same philosophy we’ve had for the last eight years – one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”

Obama accused McCain of embracing a philosophy that has opposed tougher regulations – “one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises.” McCain’s campaign accused Obama of embracing “pessimism, defeatism and weakness” in questioning the Republican’s praise of the ingenuity and vitality of American workers and charged that an Obama administration would mean higher taxes and burdensome regulation just when the economy can least afford it.

“Everything that’s been happening in the last week and a half reminds voters what’s at stake in this election,” Democratic pollster Peter Hart said. “Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac – they all may sound like arcane terminology to the voters. But in the end they know it’s about housing, about the ability to invest in new ideas, and it’s about holding onto jobs.”

As a result, voters will be looking for more than accusations and boilerplate from the two nominees. “How the candidates respond to this will be critical to Americans’ assessment of whether they’re ready for the job,” Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said in an e-mail. “In the big picture of this campaign, this issue is a ‘jump ball.’ ”

The challenge for McCain and Obama is to help people understand what has happened. President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are on the front lines of this crisis now, but come January, McCain or Obama will be in charge. They have less than 50 days to demonstrate they’re capable of dealing with it.