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Monday, September 15, 2008

Obama Surveys the Wreckage

Barack Obama's Statement:
This morning we woke up to some very serious and troubling news from Wall Street…

The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store. Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It’s a 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 that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. It’s a philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises…

This country can’t afford another four years of this failed philosophy. For years, I have consistently called for modernizing the rules of the road to suit a 21st century market – rules that would protect American investors and consumers. And I’ve called for policies that grow our economy and our middle-class together. That is the change I am calling for in this campaign, and that is the change I will bring as President.

All true, all sane, all clarifyingly, all productive, and pitch-perfect rhetorically, as usual.

The bit about "too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store" seems an especially lovely way of bringing the moral failures responsible for these perfectly predictable and preventable catastrophes back down to earth. Enormously Presidential.

By all means, let's return now to the discussion of how John McCain was a prisoner of war and how Sarah Palin can field-dress a moose.

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