There’s a good interview with Mark Salter over at The Atlantic with this excerpt standing out (along with the part in which Salter curses out Andrew Sullivan):
JG: We’ve talked in the past about narratives, and what narrative the press is looking for with McCain –
MS: Look, Obama is blaming the “deregulators,” George Bush and John McCain, for creating this whole mess, when everyone knows how this mess got started: people pushing sub-prime loans on people who can’t afford to pay them back. That’s how it got started. Which party is more culpable for that phenomenon? The Democrats! The Democrats are. We say, if you want to pin political blame pin it on the Democrats for the Community Reinvestment Act and all the things they did protecting Fannie and Freddie, a position Barack Obama wholly shared. But what do we get in the media? That Rick Davis lobbied for Fannie Mae. We get no competing narrative.
JG: Do you think your guy still has a shot?
MS: Yes I do. You know, we got hit with an unprecedented financial crisis that turned an extremely challenging environment into an extraordinarily extremely challenging environment, and I get it, but I see persuadables left, I see soft support for Obama, I see reservations about his readiness.
Oddly enough, Biden has given team McCain that very opening with his statement in Seattle:
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected president, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months in office, a comment Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., intends to highlight Monday, aides said, in order to highlight concerns some voters have had about Obama’s preparedness to be commander-in-chief.
“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee said at a Seattle fundraiser Sunday, “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
And on the economic front, there’s a great editorial in today’s Washington Post that finally goes after the Left for their instrumental role in the housing crisis.