Some fiery rhetoric just now from Barack Obama on the campaign trail, as the Illinois Democrat ripped into McCain for a couple of questionable statements he made on the economy this past week, and called the Republican nominee part of the insider culture he now opposes.
"Yesterday, John Mccain actually said that if he's president, he will take on, and I quote, 'the old boy's network in Washington,'" said Obama. "I'm not making this up. This is somebody who has 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 is going to take on the old boy's network. The old boy's network, in the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting. Come on."
The tough rhetoric and the sharp one-liner, one of the more memorable of this campaign, come as the two campaigns continue to engage voters and each other on the struggling financial markets. McCain, who stumbled by claiming the fundamentals of the economy to be strong, has since altered his rhetoric to incorporate a more populist tone. Part of that transformation has been to call for a commission to study what went wrong in the investment banking sector and called for more regulation of the financial markets - an odd stance from a pol who has a long record of promoting deregulation. Obama, certainly, wasn't buying the conversion.
"John McCain went on to say how angry he was at that greedy corporate interest on Wall Street," said the Democratic nominee. "He is so angry that he wants to punish them with $200 billion worth of tax cuts for them. And if they are not careful, he will give them even more tax cuts for shipping our jobs overseas. Who is he getting these lines from?"
He went on: "Yesterday John McCain's big solution to the crisis we are facing is a commission. That is Washington speak for we will get back to you later... We don't need a commission to tell us how we got into this mess, we need a president who can get us out of this mess. And that's the type of president I intend to be."