Pigs, toasters and BlackBerries, oh my
Posted: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 11:25 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Joe Biden
From NBC's Mark Murray
Well, that didn't take long. A day after one of the most substantive debates in quite some time -- over the economic mess on Wall Street -- the presidential campaign has devolved back to the trivial.
Earlier this morning, the Republican National Committee pounced on Biden talking about how Obama's middle-class tax cuts can benefit Americans. "Our tax plan would take that tax cut of another $130 billion that John [McCain] wants to give to people making over $250,000 next year ... and give it to the middle class -- the very people who desperately need it to stay in their homes, to buy food, take care of their gas, to fill up their tank, to buy a toaster, to employ people."
RNC spokesman Alex Conant focused solely on the "toaster" part of Biden's remarks. “John McCain’s economic plan is focused on adding jobs, and the Obama-Biden plan is focused on adding ‘toasters.'"
Next, Democrats seized on McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin's response to what McCain did at the Senate Commerce Committee to understand how markets work. "He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did." (Hat tip, Politico's Jonathan Martin.)
And Al Gore invented the internet! Obama spokesman Bill Burton piles on: “If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week."
