The Note: Populism Now

Sept. 17, 2008— -- GUSTAVUS, Ohio -- Where are Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton when you need them?

Now that the campaign has devolved into full-on populism, remember that we've been here before -- and the memories aren't good ones for either candidate.

As ABC's "50 States in 50 Days" tour rolls through Ohio -- where the jobs are leaving, the economy is struggling, and voters are sick of empty promises -- remember the last time populism ruled the process.

It was the closest Sen. John McCain came to losing his grasp on the nomination, when Romney won Michigan with a fight-for-every-job rallying cry. It was also the closest Sen. Barack Obama came to losing the nomination, when Clinton ran off a series of late victories (including in Ohio) that almost cost him the prize he'd basically already won.

So it is that neither of the candidates is particularly good at the game they are both earnestly trying to play. (And two unfortunate surrogate statements plus one unfortunately timed Hollywood fundraiser tells you again that they'd rather be playing something else.)

"John McCain and Barack Obama are both calling for tougher financial regulations as Wall Street faces its deepest crisis since the Depression. Yet Obama's record in this area is thin, and McCain has spent most of his quarter-century in Congress advocating deregulation," Bloomberg's Alison Fitzgerald and Christopher Stern report.

And yet: "Enough is enough," McCain declares in his latest ad (bringing back the experience message, and now wholeheartedly embracing government intervention).

"The truth is that while you've been living up to your responsibilities Washington has not. That's why we need change. Real change," says Obama, in a new two-minute ad.

Here's how McCain argued his case to Robin Roberts on GMA this morning, defending his 9/11 commission and arguing for oversight (as opposed to the deregulation McCain helped usher through last decade:

We need to get the best minds in America together. This is a crisis. This is one of the most severe crisis in modern times. So we've gotta get the best minds in America together to say: Look, not only did this happen but we've all gotta work together -- Republican and Democrat. I mean, this calls for bipartisanship. This calls for patriotism. This calls for saving the economy of the people, the family on this farm. They're the heartland of America. So, clearly, we have to have transparency, we have to have oversight, we have to have to combine these regulatory alphabet soup organizations, we have to make them work. They need a chief executive who knows how to crack the whip and knows how to reform Washington and reform the way that we do business."

McCain goes from icy to a FED AIG bailout on Monday to a bit more thawed today on GMA. He didn't want the bailout, "But there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here. They were going to have their lives destroyed because of the greed and excess and corruption," he said.

As we look for some specificity behind the rhetoric, whose hurdle is higher?

"[McCain's] task is complicated by the tension between his plans to continue many of the economic policies of the unpopular incumbent Republican president he hopes to succeed, and his pledges to improve the American economy and shake up Washington," Michael Cooper writes in The New York Times. "Beyond striking a more populist tone and more explicitly acknowledging the nation's economic problems, his campaign also began an effort Tuesday to cast him as a strong leader with profound experience on economic issues, given his service on the Senate Commerce Committee, where he was chairman for six years."

"McCain was operating from a defensive posture, after his expression of confidence in the economy at a rally Monday in Jacksonville, Fla., on the same day the stock market slid more than 500 points," Michael Finnegan and Noam M. Levey write in the Los Angeles Times.

"McCain, in a striking departure from his platform of corporate tax breaks and an extension of President Bush's tax cuts, assumed the mantle of economic populist, blasting what he called the 'reckless conduct, corruption, and unbridled greed' of Wall Street and railing against multimillion-dollar severance packages for CEOs as 'disgraceful,' " Scott Helman writes in The Boston Globe.

If the McCain response to the economy seemed to evolve, Hotline shows it did, with a timeline of what he said this week: "A look at John McCain's response to the market downfall and the swirl of related news shows a marked evolution in the GOPer's language -- from reformer to crisis herald to populist, a position that could moderate Obama's edge on the issue. That said, the McCain camp seems to be struggling to find its footing, and the candidate has been forced to eat some of his words, and, gulp, utter others that seem positively Democratic in nature."

McCain supported the major deregulation legislation that passed a Republican Congress in the '90s and was written by his (erstwhile? current?) adviser Phil Gramm. But it was signed by President Clinton. And Robert Scheer looks at McCain's history on deregulation and the company Obama keeps.

"(McCain's) past support of congressional deregulation efforts and his arguments against 'government interference' in the free market by federal, state and local officials have given Sen. Barack Obama an opening to press the advantage Democrats traditionally have in times of economic trouble," Michael Shear writes in The Washington Post.

Enter Douglas Holtz-Eakin, channeling Al Gore, holding up his BlackBerry to serve as a visual: "Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee "He did this," Holtz-Eakin told reporters Tuesday, per Politico's Amie Parnes. "So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."

And how about Carly Fiorina -- asked if Sarah Palin could run a major corporation: "No, I don't," she replied. "But that's not what she's running for."

Then, she made it worse: "I don't think John McCain could run a major corporation."

"McCain also tripped up yesterday, claiming that 'I was chairman of the Commerce Committee that oversights every part of our economy,' " Michael D. Shear writes in The Washington Post. "In fact, the committee's scope legally excludes 'credit, financial services, and housing' -- the very areas now in crisis."

(Does this mean Team McCain has to bench two of its top economic surrogates, just when he needs them on the field?)