Why doesn't Obama hit back harder? This is why, writes our colleague Michael Grunwald:

Race is the elephant in the room of the 2008 campaign. In West Virginia's primary, one of every four Hillary Clinton voters actually admitted to pollsters that race was a factor in their vote; that may be an Appalachian outlier, but even in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio the figure was a troubling one in ten. It's a tribute to America's racial progress that a biracial man born before Jim Crow died could come this close to the presidency, but if you believe that contemporary America is color-blind, you probably believe the Georgia congressman who recently called Obama "uppity," then claimed he had no idea it was a traditional Southern slur for blacks who didn't know their place. ("Uppity" often modified the slur everyone knows is a slur.) Blacks are still known as "minorities" because this is still a majority white country, and Obama is just as anxious to avoid running as "the black candidate" as McCain is anxious to avoid running as "the Republican candidate."

This is something to keep in mind now that the Thomas Friedmans and Arianna Huffingtons of the world are imploring Obama to get angry, to shed his above-the-fray cool and fight back against the McCain campaign's silly-season accusations that he's a charismatic chauvinist who wants to teach kindergarteners how to have sex. Over the last 18 months, Obama has been attacked as a naive novice, an empty suit, a tax-and-spend liberal, an arugula-grazing elitist and a corrupt ward heeler, but the only attacks that clearly stung him involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — attacks that portrayed him as an angry black man under the influence of an even angrier black man.

UPDATE: In a piece on this subject in the New York Review of Books, political scientist Andrew Hacker goes so far as to propose this:

Michael Tomasky has said that to win, Barack Obama "will need to build multiracial coalitions." What seems more needed, in my view, are two parallel campaigns: a quiet one to assure a maximum black turnout, and a more public one to make the most of the white backing the Obama-Biden ticket already has. His rallies, appearances, and advertisements would benefit from featuring white faces, and they should be accompanied by endorsements from white military veterans, union leaders, police chiefs, and firemen. His black supporters will know what is going on, and not take this as a rebuff.

I have a new piece up at the redesigned Time.com about the political strategy I call "Outrage and Outrageousness," in which political campaigns play on emotion and shock to cut through the media clutter. McCain has been milking this cow for weeks, though the Obama is quickly trying to catch up, with a new ad this morning that is, er, outraged at McCain's outrageousness. This comes a day after the Obama campaign turned my story from last week about a lobbyist's role in planning McCain's transition into another campaign ad.

McCain's response today (so far) is an ad called "Crisis," which is mostly positive, and distinguished by the prominent role McCain is still giving his running mate in the message.

Our own esteemed Justin Fox has been adding his rapidly-decreasing-in-real-dollar terms two cents to the story of the day; his counter-intuitive take on the legislative hijinks that led up to the crisis caught my eye:

Without Glass-Steagall repeal, Bank of America wouldn't be able to buy Merrill Lynch, the only bit of arguably positive news to come out of this crazy weekend. And more generally, it is looking like investment banks that don't have big consumer banking franchises aren't up to the challenge of surviving modern-day financial crises. Of the five big independent investment banks that existed six months ago, only two survive.

Now it is true is that we failed to replace the archaic Glass-Steagall rules with a sensible, modernized regulatory structure. But don't worry, we'll be getting to that soon enough!

This note from the Corner's John Derbyshire, however, tugged at my heartstrings:

[W]hen I first showed up on Wall Street I knew nothing about high finance and was reading up like crazy, trying to inform myself, and checking what I'd read with old Street hands around the office. Reading about Glass-Steagall's "bright line" between investment and commercial banking, I asked a colleague how strictly that was enforced. He: "Oh, about, like, the sodomy laws." That was in 1985.

He totally had a different Meese experience than I did!

John McCain is up with an ad touting his "experience" to deal with the financial crisis. But no specific experience is cited--which is attributable to the fact that McCain has been a happily orthodox Republican when it comes to financial regulation these past 26 years. He's against it. He's against Washington telling you how to run your business. The unseen hand of the market and all that...

This has been the long-standing Republican bait and switch--scaring small businesses with the threat of new regulations if the Democrats win, commiserating with larger businesses about the evils of environmental and plant safety rules, while lifting as many regulations as possible governing the financial titans whose credit should be at the heart of new economic development. But that hasn't been happening: the financial titans have been going for the quick buck rather than the sound one. Money and creativity have been redirected during the Reagan-Bush era away from substantive loans to real businesses into a Ponzi scheme of borrowing by investment bankers, so they could engage in the most irresponsible, if lucrative (for them) speculative lending imaginable...In this sense, the mortgage crisis was a perfect metaphor for Republican financial governance: Investment banks like Lehman--R.I.P.--took loans to invest money in...bad loans. In this case, the loans were bad mortgages. This is called throwing good money after bad.

Actually, John McCain has excellent experience--a ringside seat--in the vagaries of this experiment in greed and anarchy. He was a member of the Keating Five. This was the signature scandal of the Savings and Loan crisis, twenty years ago. It concerned the insider help that five Senators gave Charles Keating and his Lincoln Savings and Loan, in return for contributions and gifts. The deregulation of S&Ls--community banks dedicated to local mortgages (like George Bailey's bank in "It's A Wonderful Life")--enabled slick operators like Keating to make reckless loans in new areas where they had no expertise. The final tab to the taxpayers was $165 billion.

McCain wasn't the worst offender in the scandal. He was included in the Five to make it bipartisan (the other four were Democrats). But he knew Keating, partied with him, made inquiries on his behalf. He once told me that his role in the scandal was harder on him, in some ways, than being a prisoner of war "Because my honor was called into question."

After an experience like that, you might think Senator Honorable would have devoted himself to preventing other such crises--to making sure the Big Wall Street Casino was operating according to rules that wouldn't screw the small investors and, more to the point, the taxpayers. But he walked the anti-regulatory party line, with only occasional exceptions...and tried to lay down a smokescreen of righteousness by campaigning against small potato[e!]s like legislative earmarks--money to study the mating habits of, uh, crabs, in, uh, Alaska (proposed by Governor Honorable).

What we are seeing on Wall Street today is the result of an ideology gone amok. There was call to loosen and change the antiquated regulations governing investment back in 1980. But the Republican era has seen that loosening go to the point of near-cataclysm. Banks are failing, markets dropping. We are in the midst of a slow-motion economic crash. What happens next is an economic contraction: loans aren't available, so businesses can't expand. A crash comes at the beginning of a period of economic trouble.

John McCain, after his political near-death experience, could have made the responsible regulation of markets one of his great causes. He didn't. And today he said, once again, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." I hope he's right, but it's entirely possible that he knows as much about our economy as Sarah Palin knows about The Bush Doctrine.

Update: Here's an interesting idea from John Judis.

In today's riveting second installment of Bart Gellman's new book on Dick Cheney, the Washington Post adds further detail to that now-famous hospital bed scene in which then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to re-authorize the Bush Administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program:

Was Comey going to sit there and watch a barely conscious man make his mark? On an order that he believed, and knew Ashcroft believed, to be unlawful?

Unexpectedly, Ashcroft roused himself. Previous accounts have said he backed his deputy. He did far more than that. Ashcroft told the president's men he never should have certified the program in the first place.

"You drew the circle so tight I couldn't get the advice that I needed," Ashcroft said, according to Comey. He knew things now, the attorney general said, that he should have been told before. Spent, he sank back in his bed.

Mueller arrived just after Card and Gonzales departed. He shared a private moment with Ashcroft, bending over to hear the man's voice.

"Bob, I'm struggling," Ashcroft said.

"In every man's life there comes a time when the good Lord tests him," Mueller replied. "You have passed your test tonight."

But the larger point of today's story is how assiduously Cheney worked to keep President Bush himself from getting the information he needed:

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