If Barack Obama is victorious on November 4th, someone on his transition team should send inauguration tickets to Lehman Bros chairman Richard Fuld, writes John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

“In the past few days, Obama has had the demeanor of a man who fell out a window and landed on a trampoline; McCain has looked like someone who thought he had won the lottery only to discover, en route to the prize ceremony, that he had been sold a phony ticket. The epizootic in the financial markets resurrected doubts about the wisdom of McCain’s decision to pass over the business-minded Mitt Romney as his running mate, a choice that left him to face alone tough questions about economics—his least favorite subject. Last week, McCain restated his belief that the fundamentals of the economy were strong and flip-flopped on the regulation of Wall Street. “How is it supposed to reassure people to hear Mr. McCain intone, as he did yesterday, the words ‘derivatives’ and ‘credit default swaps’ as if it’s the first time he’d ever heard of them?” the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal wondered.”

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