host

"The problem" for Obama and for Clinton and McCain as well, is that already, and increasingly. the focus of the electorate is and will be about their own pocketbooks/wallets. <h3>The wars and "a grown-up conversation about race", are not where most people are focusing their attention.</h3>

The Fed rate cuts and inflation are killing the CD savings returns and spending power of the average elderly person, and a trip to "the pumps" has become a $45 outlay, vs. $13 in late 2001.

I don't think that the people Obama needs to connect with, are paying attention or are impressed. I don't think they give a shit about what his "hate minister" has been saying. The people paying attention to the subject of this thread are those already committed to Obama and those who would never consider voting for him.

By the first week of november, unemployment will be up more than 25 percent from the present level (5% now vs. about 6.5% seven months from now) and there will be "more shocks" to the economic system. A neighbor, friend or relative will have sold a house for a lower price than anyone could predict last year, or been foreclosed on, and everyone will know one or two people who have been "downsized" or laid off.

There will be three or four scary "down days" on wall street, and the debt ceiling will be "revised up' by congress to allow another trillion of borrowing to prop up the Fed's poor balance sheet (It has $374 billion remaining on it's books of a former $800 billion asset portfolio, after recent bailouts and "guarantees" like the $30 billion it extended to JPM for it's $2 per share "purchase" of imploded Bear Stearns, last weekend.) Supplemental appropriations to fund "war operations", and perhaps another Bush "stimulus package", as well as shortfalls in anticipated federal tax revenue from the "economic downturn" will easily eat up the rest of an additional "borrowed trillion".

Obama should focus on speaking to the undecided voters about the same things that any savvy democratic WASP male candidate would be "jaw boning" about in these circumstances....think Bill Clinton in 1992. I think it's a mistake to do anything but ignore the right's linking of Obama to Wright. I've been posting for 54 weeks on this forum that it is about "the economy, stupid", and it increasingly is. Looking, talking and acting like Bill Clinton did in the 1992 campaign is what all three candidates will be advised to do. The two democrats have a distinct advantage because they can blame the party in power for the tanking economy, as Clinton did in '92.

Obama is on record in a July, 2007 CFR "FOREIGN POLICY" magazine article, proposing an increase in the size of the military via the recruiting of an addtional 92,000 ground troops. He could attract more voters by declaring that military spending, increased from $295 billion in FY 1998, to more than $700 billion annually today, with the addition of war "supplement" spending, hasn't made us safer, but it has enriched Halliburton, Blackwater, and other "republican insider" defense contractors. Obama should promise people that, in an Obama presidency, the troops now in Iraq will soon be home with their families, and they and National Guard troops will be working to rebuild and replace worn out equipment, while they are guarding the "home front" to truly "keep us safe". He should promise to make reducing military spending, with a priority to re-equip our forces with conventional armored vehicles left behind in Iraq or now beyond repair.

Instead of advocating a costly increase in spending on nearly 100,000 new ground troops, he should commit to spending $100 billion less next year on the defense and homeland security departments, via ALL BID, instead of "no bid" contracts, purging of republican, defense and security industry "cronies" from government, and SHIFTING THE SAVINGS INTO HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM SPENDING, JOB RETRAINING, etc.....

For either Obama or Hillary to be calling attention to how they are different from 1992 WASP male candidate Bill Clinton (WASP male is perceived as "plain vanilla", like the guy reading the 6:30 network news on TV), thus making the campaign about the candidate, instead of about the issues, IS EXACTLY THE REPUBLICAN STRATEGY WITH THE "HATE MINISTER" PR "OP".

IT WORKED.....OBAMA WAS FLUSHED OUT BY IT...MADE THE MISTAKE OF DEVOTING A SPEECH IN RESPONSE TO IT, A SPEECH THAT THIS WEEK, SHOULD HAVE BEEN A FRANK TALK TO THE UNDECIDED ABOUT WHAT HIS PLANS ARE TO CUSHION THE IMPACT OF RECESSSION!