The US’ economic difficulties have played havoc with Republican Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign as he tries to distance himself from the unpopular administration of US President George W. Bush and walk away from his own record as a champion of government deregulation.
As the stock market has plummeted, polls show support rising for Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama in recent days, erasing the bounce McCain enjoyed after the Republican National Convention and his surprise pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the party’s first female vice presidential nominee.
McCain found himself in a particularly difficult spot on Wednesday as the bellwether Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 450 points — slightly more than 4 percent and the second huge loss this week — after an US$85 billion government bailout of one of the world’s largest insurance companies, American International Group Inc (AIG).
McCain had vigorously opposed the bailout just hours before it was announced.
The move by the Federal Reserve forced McCain to quickly retool his message from one of opposition to a grudging acceptance and acknowledgment that the government had acted to protect millions of Americans from further financial hardship.
US voters’ prime anxiety ahead of the Nov. 4 election is the struggling US economy and McCain is particularly vulnerable on that issue.
McCain said during the primary campaign — and likely to his everlasting regret — that he was not as well versed on economic issues as he would like. Compounding that, the 72-year-old former Vietnam prisoner of war has been closely tied to Bush, whose popularity is at near record lows and most likely falling further under the weight of the economic slide this week — a meltdown the likes of which has not been seen for nearly 80 years.
Obama, who appears to have regained his focus in the White House contest, was hitting McCain hard as a product of a Republican drive over recent decades to deregulate the financial markets, moves that the first-term Illinois senator blamed for the mounting damage to the US economy.
The economic crisis, Obama said, is “a stark reminder of the failures of crony capitalism and an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary.”
McCain campaigned in Michigan, one of the states hardest hit by eight straight months of rising unemployment.
At the General Motors Orion assembly plant, he told workers: “We are going to fight the special interests and corruption in Washington. We are going to fight the greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street.”
Some workers chanted Obama’s name as McCain left the plant.
On Wednesday in Elko, a conservative, rural Nevada mining community, Obama mocked McCain’s response to Wall Street’s meltdown.
“Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he’s president he’ll take on — and I quote — ‘the old boys network in Washington.’ I’m not making this up,” Obama said. “This is somebody who’s been in Congress for 26 years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign. And now he tells us that he’s the one who’s going to take on the old boys network,” Obama said. “The old boys network. In the McCain campaign that’s called a staff meeting. Come on.”
While McCain was forced to retreat on his opposition to the Federal Reserve bailout and re-calibrated his remarks about the lifeline tossed to AIG, he called for an investigation to uncover any wrongdoing.
“The government was forced to commit US$85 billion,” McCain said in a statement. “These actions stem from failed regulation, reckless management and a casino culture on Wall Street that has crippled one of the most important companies in America.”
Obama sought advantage in the financial carnage and purchased an extraordinarily long 2 minutes of television time across several battleground states to air a lengthy commercial.
In it, Obama says: “600,000 Americans have lost their jobs since January. Paychecks are flat and home values are falling. It’s hard to pay for gas and groceries and if you put it on a credit card they’ve probably raised your rates.
“You’re paying more than ever for health insurance that covers less and less. This isn’t just a string of bad luck. The truth is that while you’ve been living up to your responsibilities, Washington has not. That’s why we need change. Real change.”
While declaring there was no easy solution to the deep troubles facing the US, Obama said he “approved this message because bitter, partisan fights and outworn ideas of the left and the right won’t solve the problems we face today. But a new spirit of unity and shared responsibility will.”
Neither McCain nor Obama offered specifics about what kind of regulation they would bring to the economic crisis.
Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, meanwhile, accused Democrats of being out of bounds for criticizing McCain when he said on Monday that the fundamentals of the US economy are strong.
Palin said in an interview with Fox News Channel: “It was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Senator McCain chose to use because the fundamentals … He means our work force, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong and that is the foundation of our economy.”
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Hundreds of thousands of Guyana citizens living at home and abroad would receive a payout of about US$478 each after the country announced it was distributing its “mind-boggling” oil wealth. The grant of 100,000 Guyanese dollars would be available to any citizen of the South American country aged 18 and older with a valid passport or identification card. Guyanese citizens who normally live abroad would be eligible, but must be in Guyana to collect the payment. The payout was originally planned as a 200,000 Guyanese dollar grant for each household in the country, but was reframed after concerns that some citizens, including
RSS