A major component of my job as an historian is to deconstruct discourses and in so doing reduce them to their most simple, most essential message. As tools of the trade often are, this task is now second nature and it has served me well during this campaign, bringing numerous contradictions into view. One dawned on me just today while reviewing some McCain speeches from the past month.

In the wake of the credit meltdown, after McCain finally realized that the "fundamentals of our economy" were not, alas, "sound," he eventually came around to assigning blame. He pinned it squarely on the "excesses and greed of Wall Street and Washington." It sounds reasonable but in light of more recent statements, I now see that he was either just reaching for a nice stump slogan or being outright disingenuous (and maybe both). Greed is the thing to blame. Reasonable enough! We all learn as children that greed's bad and that it should be avoided lest we become morally bankrupt (or, as the case is for many Wall Streeter now, ACTUALLY bankrupt). So what's the remedy? What's the antithesis of greed? Sharing, right? That's the key to correcting our economic and societal woes. Fairness, egalitarianism, brotherly love, spreading the wealth... SCREECH. Stop right there. Wait one minute. That's what Obama said and that's precisely why McCain fingered him as a "Socialist," and the senator from Illinois's in hot water for it now.

Catch my sarcasm? What McCain inadvertently implied as a solution by suggesting that greed was the problem is precisely what Obama's now being hammered for. McCain states often and prominently in his stump speeches that "America didn't become the greatest nation on earth by spreading the wealth; we became the greatest nation by creating new wealth."

His essential message: Greed is American! Barack Obama is not.

(I realize well that the truth of both candidates' stances are not represented well in any of these campaign slogans but if words had meaning, as I wish they did, they would be most damning.)