This morning on the Today Show:

(This is from memory, so it may not be word for word)

Matt Lauer:  You condemned Sen McCain for not supporting the AIG Bailout, yet Sen Biden your running mate, said basically the same thing a few minutes later in a different interview.  This gives the appearance of just trying to gain some partisan advantage.  Isn't this the sort of thing that voters are tired of?

Obama: Well, Joe may have spoken too soon, but I will tell you what voters are tired of.  The same old Bush administration policies that created this mess.  You don't get to take a 26 year voting record and throw it out the window.

(Now I am going to try and channel Bill O'Reilly)

Talking Points:

You, Mr. Obama barely have a voting record at all, and can change your positions with the wind to take whatever position polls the best.  This country faces an economic challenge which will require consumer confidence to get out of.  By attempting to spread panic and worry for partisan advantage, you hurt our economy even more.

In point of fact, the policies which created this mess grew out of Clinton era laws which encouraged banks to make riskier loans to increase home ownership, and other policies which required banks to make a certain percentage of loans to local areas which banks operate in regardless of the default risk.

It is disingenuous to campaign on returning the economic prosperity of the Clinton years on the one hand, and misrepresent those same policies on the other.  

The truth of the matter is that the prosperity of the Clinton years was based on mortgaging our future. Interest rates were lowered to encourage economic growth by making money cheap for businesses to invest in capital improvements.  However long-term, these same measures devalued the dollar in world market, and encouraged foreign investors to gobble up what was at that time cheap American businesses due to the weak dollar.

Now eight years after the Clinton policies, we are seeing the natural outcome of those policies come to fruition.  We garnered immediate gains eight years ago by mortgaging our future, and the bill is now due.  The market could not sustain the ever increasing rise in real estate values.  Short term we were able to ride that trend by making money ever cheaper, but ultimately there is only so low, and so long you can sustain those interest rates.

President Bush is not blameless here, but I will need to give him some slack considering the additional challenges of the post 9/11 world.  Making controlled changes to the Clinton economic policies would have been wildly unpopular due to the Iraq War, and would have caused home prices to fall sooner.  In retrospect, this would have been preferable to the current market collapse, but hindsight is, as they say, 20/20.

Mr. Obama, I must tell you that I do NOT trust you, nor should American voters.  Your history shows no record of leadership on any issue that you support.  In fact your ideology is suspect.  So even if I were to believe a single word out of your mouth, I would still not support you because your policies are ill-thought out and reckless.  You propose spending nearly a Trillion dollars on new programs with a promise of paying for it by raising taxes on only on the “rich.” Not only is this akin to convincing us how much you saved shopping by using coupons, it is counter to American principles of reward for risk and hard work.

What you really are proposing are the failed policies of socialist dogma which calls for income redistribution.  Perhaps the Europeans would be interested in your “leadership” somewhere, but as for this American, I will reject you and your so-called ideas.