A short while ago, I was listening to the DNC’s Susan Turnbull speaking on POTUS08. The topic was, unsurprisingly, the mess on Wall Street and how the two candidates would respond. Turnbull sounds like a nice enough woman, and Lord knows I’ve had my off days appearing before a microphone or a camera, but boy, was she off-message.

She, like the rest of Team Obama, seem obsessed with McCain’s declaration that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” ignoring anything else he’s ever said in any speech dealing with the economy. She felt the need to bring up the accusation that McCain is too close to lobbyists, when in fact this mess is (so far, thankfully) an example of the limited power of lobbyists. Lehman Brothers wants a bailout, and isn’t going to get one. Whatever that firm was paying their lobbyists, they probably feel today like it was too much.

She insisted that McCain could not be arguing that American workers are strong, because he’s voted against the minimum wage. Are the Democrats really going to respond to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the risk to AIG, the stock market dropping 4.4. percent in a day, and the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac steering their ships straight onto the rocks… by promising to raise the minimum wage again?

Do these guys have any other plays in their playbook? These guys recommend minimum wage hikes the way medieval doctors recommended the application of leeches. Beyond that, the minimum wage just got increased on July 24, from $5.85 to $6.55, and goes up to $7.25 next July.

Interesting that the day after Wall Street has one of its roughest days, the recommendations from Obama are… exactly what they were the day before. Lobbyists are bad. CEO bonuses are too high. Tax cuts for the rich are bad. The market is completely unregulated (tell that to those who fill out Sarbanes-Oxley compliance forms).

(As Suitably Flip notes, Obama never really got into what he meant by “modernizing the rules of the road for a 21st Century market.” I wasn’t exactly bowled over by the details from McCain or Palin, either.)