Barack Obama is hitting John McCain over the proposal he announced Tuesday night that would have the Federal Government buy up all the bad mortgages in the country:
PORTSMOUTH, Ohio, Oct. 9 — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Thursday said rival John McCain’s mortgage rescue plan “punishes” taxpayers and rewards lending institutions that created the crisis, while McCain charged that his opponent’s response showed a lack of concern for homeowners.
The mortgage proposal became the latest point of strife between two campaigns that have tried to turn discussions about the economic crisis into questions about their opponent’s fitness for office. Echoing a theme of the past several days, McCain said Obama’s moves have shown a lack of judgment, while the senator from Illinois continued to cast his opponent’s reactions as uneven and rash.
On a day when some conservatives also critiqued McCain’s proposal, Obama used the “risky idea” as a way to describe McCain as a desperate candidate “lurching” from idea to idea as he tries to find an answer to the economic crisis that has roiled the presidential campaign.
“His first response to the housing crisis in March was that homeowners shouldn’t get any help at all,” Obama told a crowd at a minor-league baseball park in Dayton, part of a two-day swing through the battleground state of Ohio.
“Then a few weeks ago, he put out a plan that basically ignored homeowners. Now, in the course of 12 hours, he’s ended up with a plan that punishes taxpayers, rewards banks and won’t solve our housing crisis.”
(…)
Obama has also continually couched the argument in terms of whether McCain can be counted on to be stable in a crisis. In recent days, Obama and his surrogates have emphasized words such as “lurching” and “erratic” to describe the Republican, while a campaign ad also accuses McCain of being “erratic.”
“This is the kind of erratic behavior we’ve been seeing out of Senator McCain,” Obama said in Dayton. “You remember the first day of this crisis, he came out and said the economy was fundamentally sound. Then two hours later, he said we were in a crisis.
“I don’t think we can afford that kind of erratic and uncertain leadership in these uncertain times. We need steady leadership in the White House. We need a president we can trust in times of crisis. And that’s why I’m running for president of the United States of America.”
And they’ve already come out with an ad that hits on exactly that theme:
Given the fact that McCain’s scheme is a big, smelly pile of pandering crap, he deserves everything Obama is going to hit him with on this one.
