KEY POINTS:
To see the drop-dead power of one cracking, lean political ad, look at the latest from the Barack Obama campaign. It dropped into television programs across America on Wednesday.
One of scores released by both sides in the Presidential campaign , the new ad takes just 30 seconds to make as devastating a case against John McCain, Obama's 72 year old Republican opponent, as you'll ever see. The beauty is in the sparseness. It uses just John McCain's words. And it only needed 58 to thrust McCain's three towering negatives into American living rooms; his age, his choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate and his blinding lack of economic expertise at a time of sudden economic crisis.
Just 58 words and 30 seconds. Not a sound from Obama or any other Democrat - only a distant melodic guitar off in the background. McCain did all of Obama's work himself for this ad with his own, probably long forgotten, on the record quotes. Two years ago McCain told the Wall Street Journal that he didn't understand much about economics. Then a year ago he said he might have to rely on the economic expertise of whomever he picked as his running mate for help. And now he's picked Sarah Palin. Whatever the former television sports reporter, beauty Queen, small town Mayor and Alaskan Governor's talents are , they are not economic.
The charitable might give McCain points for honesty or straight talk - as he likes to call it. But he look's like the bumbling old white guy in this.
The McCain team long banked on the war in Iraq as being the central issue of this campaign. They believed the success of the troop surge - which McCain has vociferously supported - would badly undermine Obama who had, of course, opposed it. But Wall Street's sudden and furious melt down and the bitter winter times building across the United State's as homes are sold out from underneath stricken borrowers have rendered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan very much second or even third order issues. That was dumb luck for Barack Obama. It meant that his area of greatest vulnerability - his pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq - was subsumed - for now at least - by the economic crisis.
That is not to say that Obama has or claims answers for the country's economic inferno. But the earthquakes on Wall Street surely mean that ten of thousands of Republican leaning older Americans now watching their retirement investments on the stock market ebbing away are no longer certainties to vote for McCain's Bush-like economic policies.
As John McCain stomped across Florida In Wednesday flanked by former military officers the old war horse again questioned whether Obama had what it takes to protect Americans from terrorists.
That sign Bill Clinton has on his desk, It's the economy stupid, remains as prescient as ever. Like yesterday's ad.
