Today at Cooper Union University, Senator Obama gave an important speech on the state of the economy. You can read the transcript here.  As the New York Times reports, the speech was notable for Obama's rejection of DLC-style neoliberal economic policy and the sort of reckless deregulation that the Clinton Administration aided and abetted during the 1990s:
 

"But Mrs. Clinton said the current financial difficulties were rooted in the housing slump, while Mr. Obama took pains to cast the blame for it on a decade's long easing of government regulatory oversight.

"Mr. Obama said the housing crisis was a result of the popping of yet another large bubble that has distorted the economy during the past decade. And in each case, he said, there was a failure to pass meaningful reforms. No one doubted, he noted, the need to change the Depression-era law that separated commercial banks and investment banks. But, as Mr. Obama's aides noted in handouts supporting the speech, the banking and insurance industries spent more than $300 million on a successful campaign to repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

 "This new economic world, Mr. Obama said, granted far more freedom to bankers but without modernizing the regulatory framework and insisting on transparency. And the same pattern played out in the regulation of home mortgages, he said.

"'When subprime mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn,' he said, 'a patchwork quilt of regulators were unable or unwilling to protect the American people.'"

What this speech tells me is that if the state of the economy gets worse, and it almost certainly will, Obama is the only candidate with the intellectual independence and perspective to take bold, Rooseveltian chances in responding, rather than just employing Robert Rubin/Herbert Hoover-style Capitalist tinkering.  Neither McCain nor Hillary will challenge the free-market fundamentalism on which our last economic bubbles were premised.  And that's part of the reason why Obama's sloganeering about  "a new generation of leadership" is not just words: As this speech demonstrates, he is not beholden to the same ideological orthodoxies championed by Reagan and consolidated by Clinton. If we get into an economic hole that demands fresh thinking and a departure from the free-market fundamentalism that dominates the current political discourse, Obama's the only one with the capacity to apply creative solutions for digging us out. (Well, I suppose I'd trust John Edwards to dig us out too, but what can you do...)