American voters’ main concern, despite protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the economy. And as the stock market plummets and American financial giants go out of business or find themselves struggling to survive, Mr McCain’s post-convention bounce - mainly driven by his surprise pick of Sarah Palin as the Republican Party’s first female vice presidential nominee - has vanished.
Mr McCain found himself in a particularly difficult spot yesterday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 450 points - slightly more than 4 per cent and the second huge loss this week - after an $85 billion government bailout of the world’s largest insurance companies, American International Group.
Mr McCain had vigorously opposed the bailout just hours before it was announced.
The move by the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, forced Mr McCain to quickly reshape his message from one of opposition to a grudging acceptance and acknowledgement that the government had acted to protect millions of Americans from further financial hardship.
Mr McCain said during the primary campaign that he was not as well versed on economic issues as he would like. The 72-year-old former Vietnam prisoner of war has also been closely tied to President George Bush, whose popularity is at near record lows and will probably fall further under the weight of the economic slide.
Mr Obama, who appears to have regained his focus in the White House contest, was hitting Mr 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.
In Elko, Nevada, a rural mining community, Mr Obama mocked Mr McCain’s response to Wall Street’s meltdown.
“Yesterday, John Mr 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,” Mr 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,” Mr Obama said. “The old boys’ network. In the Mr McCain campaign that’s called a staff meeting. Come on.”
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