Joe Biden with Katie Couric:

Katie: "Your vice presidential rival, Governor Palin, said, 'To the rest of America, that's not patriotism. Raising taxes is about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse.'"

Biden: "How many small businessmen are making one million, four hundred thousand--average in the top 1 percent. Give me a break. I remind my friend, John McCain, what he said--when Bush called for war and tax cuts--he said, it was immoral, immoral, to take a nation to war and not have anybody pay for it. I am so sick and tired of this phoniness. The truth of the matter is that we are in trouble. And the people who do not need a new tax cut should be willing, as patriotic Americans, to understand the way to get this economy back up on their feet is to give middle class taxpayers a break. We take the tax cut they're getting and we give it to the middle class."

The attack dog goes after the right flank. No apology, no defensiveness, but righteous indignation. Fine with me if Obama wants to run a 2-minute ad laying out the bones of an economic program--it plays stodgy to me and some friends, but never mind--but this tone from Biden is more than welcome, especially in Ohio.

While we've been preoccupied with Wasilla, Trig, Track, Todd, Bristol and Levi, the Bridge and the Road to Nowhere, the deep critique of celebrity politics, the bucolic life of small-town Alaska and its proximity to Russia, the virtues of drilling, and lately, the meltdown of global financial markets, Jeffrey Goldberg has published an important piece on "The Wars of John McCain," referring not only to the actual war John S. McCain III fought but to his mentality--and also the wars of his father, the Vietnam admiral, and tangentially, his admiral grandfather, and by implication, the whole chain of American wars to which he is evidently devoted, wars that McCains have fought in, as the current McCain is proud to repeat.

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Mr. McCain's opponent, Senator Barack Obama, termed the situation on Wall Street "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression," blaming the upheaval on the policies employed during the last eight years of a Republican-controlled White House.

"I certainly don't fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to," Mr. Obama said in a statement. "It's a philosophy we've had for the last eight years - one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else."

He added: "This country can't afford another four years of this failed philosophy."

"The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store," Mr. Obama said. "Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression."

Personalize it! John McCain's economic adviser, Phil Gramm, Mr. Deregulation-and-Stop-Your-Whining, can certainly be faulted. If he, John McCain, and George W. Bush had had their way, private Social Security accounts would have shriveled overnight. McCain said it was a "disgrace" that the young subsidize the retirement of their elders. (Hat tip to Harold Pollack on this.)

Without doubt, through all the noise of the polls, the weekly daily hourly gotchas and stomach-turning whirls of the wheel, in the end a lot of people who ought to be voting for Barack Obama will hesitate, will stop, because he is a black man. He's an actual African-American, a man of mixed race who, because of the way race is coded in America, counts as black.

I don't mean to say that race is the only reason why anyone but raging warmongers would hesitate to vote for Obama. You can argue that McCain has the more relevant foreign policy experience--though to do so, you have to overlook his ill temper; his evident joy while singing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran"; his unregenerate belief that the Vietnam war could, and should, have been won; his reliance on neoconservative advisers; and of course, his gung-ho support of the Iraq catastrophe. You can feel that opposition to abortion trumps everything else. You can argue, against the evidence, that lowering taxes on the rich is good for everybody. You can believe that the man is deep down a maverick, overlooking the fact that he was a straight-out right-wing Republican before he was a (partial) maverick, a phase which took place, in turn, before he decided that he was a right-winger--and because of this history, you deserve a medal if you can tell me who the authentic John McCain is. You can decide to overlook the bad character that's manifest in McCain's current campaign of lies. And so on.

But a bit of straight talk here: If Barack Obama loses, it will substantially be because of his color.

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