Both Obama and McCain are claiming to be the “change” candidate based on the relatively true proposition that neither of them actually brings anything new to the table. Obama may even be like Bush.
Quoting from Greg Mankiw:
In the debate last night, Barack Obama asks a good question about the present financial crisis but then gives an answer that is, at best, incomplete:
The question, I think, that we have to ask ourselves is, how did we get into this situation in the first place? Two years ago, I warned that, because of the subprime lending mess, because of the lax regulation, that we were potentially going to have a problem and tried to stop some of the abuses in mortgages that were taking place at the time…
Mankiw continue:
… There is plenty of blame to go around. Indeed, the problem goes back at least as far as the Johnson administration, which helped set up a housing finance system that was always fundamentally problematic.
If Senator Obama really wants to transcend partisan politics, as he would sometimes have us believe, he might want to give a slightly more balanced view of the history of how this all started. He also might want to take note that the Bush administration warned about some of these problems five years ago and had their reform efforts stymied by prominent members of Senator Obama’s own party.
In other words, Obama, like Bush, was such a great leader on the issue that he was able to identify the problem [which had already been identified] without actually accomplishing anything to fix it. Change we can count on.
