Candidates Get the Economy Wrong: Pundits

With the economy in trouble, John McCain and Barack Obama have been talking economics. How are they doing?

• Not very well, says the Wall Street Journal, declaring that the candidates “appear to know more about Mars than they do about financial markets.” Obama’s offering a return to “paternalist” policies, while McCain seems off-message and out of touch.
• McCain’s responses, particularly his call for a financial 9/11 commission, seem awfully slow, writes John Fout of TheStreet.com, and his financial advisors have terrible records.

• McCain’s do-nothing approach is shockingly reminiscent of Herbert Hoover’s, writes Eric Rauchway of the American Prospect. Hoover, too, wouldn’t regulate and argued that the fundamentals were strong—right before the Great Depression hit.
• But the alternative doesn’t impress George Neumayr of the American Spectator, who says Obama’s economic policies “seem to all come from a grab-bag of quasi-Marxist theories he picked up either in left-wing classrooms or socialist churches.”

(More Election 2008 stories.)