What’s important to me is not how much personal wealth each candidate has, but that McCain seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that his own huge wealth puts in a dramatically different situation from most Americans. While ordinary people are suffering, he’s out there saying the economy’s in great shape and that the recession is “psychological.” It’s not very surprising that someone who doesn’t even know how many houses he owns would also be unaware that a lot of Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

As opposed to Obama who made $4 million last year and his wife made $316k amd who apparently can’t spare a dime for his desitute half brother in Kenya who claims he lives on a dollar a month. Never having been in the situation, it is easy for the average person to misunderstand how hard it is to keep track of finances at that level. First of all, it isn’t his money. It is his wife’s. So, it is unlikely that a man with the schedule of a US Senator spends much, if any time managing her money. The entire house issue is ridiculouis. McCain was being interviewed for a print (digitial) story, not a broadcast piece. It is very customary to offer to provide exact details supplimentary that aren’t immediately clear ata the time. I’m sure if he sat down and listed all their homes, he could have done it. Did you ever think maybe he was rushed, behind schedule and might have been simply trying to get through the interview? I am quite sure he deferred his answer because of the legality of who or what actually owns the homes. Homes can be owned jointly, individually, in trusts, etc. Knowing how the media likes to jump on any factual error, I am sure he just wanted to give the man the correct information. If this and his continual use of the $5 million to be rich joke, that was told as a joke and even described as such in the interview, is the best Obama has, he will continue to decline in the polls and have no chance in Novebmer. It is like these campaigns are being run by a sixth grade class.

Mr Horrigan -
You age is showing if you had to go back to Monty Python for comment.

The point is not which candidate owns what or how they got it (although I suppose if one inherits one’s wealth or marries into it, it may be considered different from someone who actually had to work for it) — rather it is who can relate to the majority of voters’ needs.

ADam - did you have this much problem with Mrs. Heinz Kerry’s wealth? I do know that McCain won’t show up at the convention saying, “I’m John McCain and I’m reporting for duty (followed by a a salute).

To answer Centrist below, I don’t know if Adam had any trouble with Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s wealth, but plenty of conservative commentators did! Remember Rush Limbaugh–or was it O’Reilly–calling Kerry a “gigolo.” It was quite the theme among conservative pundits for a while.

The point of the hammering Obama is giving McCain over his houses has nothing to do with having wealth per se and any discussion of comparative wealth is beside the point. It is just that when so many are suffering because of the very Bush economic policies that McCain also espouses, his sheltered status and the resulting world-view is important to understand. Obama’s ads may be negative, but they are also substantive and are intended to help people understand how unrealistic McCain’s economic proposals really are.

It is worth nothing that McCain can find nothing substantive to counter-punch wtih apart from yelling “Rezko.” He actually implies a relationship between Rezko and Obama that demonstrably did not exist–his response ad is basically a lie. Just search on Factcheck.com (search under Rezko).

I did see Carl Rove trying to imply that Obama’s observations about the relationship between McCain’s wealthy lifestyle and his economic policies were an attack on McCains wife because, get this, she owns all the houses. Talk about desperate, not to mention stupid!

RHarnack: Dude, Python is timeless.

This whole election fiasco is beginning to remind me of a couple of out of touch ideologues engaging in the “Upper Class Twit of the Year” contest while attempting to “Confuse a Cat.”

Scipio (where is Hannibal?) -
Sorry, Dude, but except for Spam and the Lumberjack Song, Benny Hill was funnier.

But for me it was the Smothers Brothers and Mort Sahl.

Centrist,

Do you have a problem with reading? I clearly said that my problem was not with wealth. Maybe you should try actually reading comments before responding next time.

Centrist -

I’ll say it: I do have a problem with wealthy elites running everything. I am sick of a ruling political class that comes from privilege and how tough the policies of that ruling elite are making it for me and people like me who have to work for everything we have.

The level of concentration of wealth among the top 2% of richest people is higher than it’s been here in over 100 years. We used to have effective institutions for upward economic mobility - labor organizations; quality public schools; accessible higher education; decent public health systems. All of them have been undermined and Balkanized for a generation to a point where today we are turning into a society with rigidly fixed class structures. A bright low-income person who graduates from college now often does so with as much debt as a home loan. It’s virtually impossible for a two parent family to survive on one income now, even if the primary income earner graduated from college.

Obama and Biden both started off at pretty humble economic stations. They’ve done well for themselves and can credit their genuine effort and a robust social structure for economic mobility for their success. They’ve had the experience of working hard, playing by the rules and being rewarded. Their policy priorities show it.

McCain? Scion of a long line of admirals marries a beer baroness and launches a political career. He proposes to continue the same general economic policies of a president whose daddy was president and grandpa was a senator. He wants to impose taxes on our health insurance and eliminate taxes on giant corporate profits. He wants to expand trade agreements that allow jobs to go to places with zero human rights standards and to continue to suppress workers’ rights to organize here in the USA. No way is that change and no way does McCain have real understanding of what it means for most people to get through their lives everyday.

I totally disagree that it is impossible for someone to emerge from the lower class into the upper class. I did it with zero connections or rich relatives, so can you. I am also tired of hearing people say McCain wants to “eliminate taxes on corporations”. First of all, there is no such thing as a corporate tax. Second of all, he simply is talking about lowering the tax rates to something on par with most other countries. Corporations are owned by shareholders and taxes paid by corporations are paid by the shareholders, inclduding mutual funds and retirement/pension funds, in the form of lower stock prices. This is not the same thing as the capital gains (or ordinary income taxes if you hold less than a year) paid when a stock is sold for a profit. McCain is not suggestiong that should change. America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. First is Japan where the economy is even worse than ours. Why are companies leaving America? Because taxes are lower in other countries. You want to keep good jobs here, then you have to make the environment attractive or in this digital world, they will move to Ireland or Slovakia or other countries that have tax systems for the 21st Century. Obama’s plan to increase taxes will have the opposite effect from what he says he wants to accomplish by driving companies away.