I posted this morning for the early risers and west coast night owls a prediction that the coming days and weeks were going to be rough and now we are there already. I said:

I have been searching for a metaphor to express what the next few weeks are going to seem like, as the economy continues to deteriorate, the presidential race gets low-down and slimy dirty and who knows what else hits the fan.

It came to me that this was going to be like going through a car wash tunnel with the car windows rolled down.

When you go through a car wash tunnel, you sit warm and dry in your car while only a few inches from your face huge rotating brushes dash and dart and rubadub and pound, and torrents of scalding, soapy water spew and spatter as your car moves relentlessly down the belt. Exciting to be so close and yet to be only a spectator.

With the windows down... no fun.

Now the Republicans are taking the only path they have left, which is to attack the personality of Barack Obama, and I think Obama is making a mistake to use the Keating affair to attack McCain. This very old news, it would be like attacking Hillary Clinton at this stage of the game by asking, "when Bill was playing with his cigar, what did Hillary know and when did she know it?".

Obama should stick to (quoting Bill) "the economy stupid". Getting down in the mud with the Republicans, Obama has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

As to the economy it is now China's move. Here is an excerpt from an interesting article by analyst M R Venkatesh:

The recent bailout package being approved in the US Congress needs to be viewed in the context of the spurt in the accumulation of forex reserves of China by about $500 billion in the last six months to about $2 trillion in aggregate. This gargantuan build-up of forex reserves by China has strangely received very little attention of economists, policy analysts, currency traders and, of course, geo-strategists around the world. Why is China engaged in this exercise? What could be its implications on the on going global financial crisis? Could China trip the bailout package announced by the US last week? Crucially what are the implications for the existing global order?(...) It may be noted that the Chinese, unlike the others, have always questioned the global order with the US at the helm of affairs. And the Chinese accumulation of forex reserves is surely a strategy that perhaps has an ominous side to it. All this is not pure economics as it is made out to be. Rather, it was and remains a well-planned economic, political and military strategy of the Chinese. And in a way it is the mirror image of the Star Wars programme that the then US President Reagan unleashed on the erstwhile USSR in the early eighties that eventually bankrupted the later within a few years as it engaged in competitive arms build-up with the former. Statecraft is all about engaging other countries at one's own terms, pace, time and cost. This is what the US did to the USSR in the eighties and succeeded in dynamiting that country. And that is what China could do to a vulnerable US in the coming months. Crucially, if it doesn't, from the Chinese perspective it might well rue this moment forever. The US till date was depending on the Chinese for imports and to finance them as well for such imports. Now they will have to be considerably dependent on the Chinese to protect their currency as well as to ensure liquidity in their money markets. And that completely alters the existing global order.

Anyone who reads Sun Tzu and Mao could tell for some time that China's objective, after the fall of the Soviet Union left them facing America alone, has been to get the USA by the short and curlies and that seems to be just what they have done. They hold the US economy in the palm of their hand. They have a police state with which to control civil disturbance in a great economic upheaval and they could ride it out to be "the last man standing"... as the article says, if they don't do it, they may live to regret it.

So, in the next few days, we may see breathtaking things on the world economic front, an undreamed of humiliation of America's brand and Obama cannot afford to get off message. ES (economy stupid) ES, ES, ES and ES.

Leave the mud to the Republicans because they have had all of what they are going to spring in the next few days prepared for months.  It will be impossible to match it smear for smear. What we are going to see very shortly is every old girlfriend, every old tape, every old dossier: the objective being to be in Bradley distance of Obama in the key states on election day.

This is the time for Obama to be noble, inspiring, nonpartisan and reassuring. His message to the American people as they drive through the car wash with their window down should be in essence "don't cry, come sit on daddy's lap and let him kiss it and make it well".

If he can manage to do that, he might even get my vote.
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