What do you want, someone who will help you or someone who will hurt you?

Brad DeLong, maybe the best of the economics bloggers and prof at UC Berkeley, presents a pie chart showing just how tiny a sliver of the budget deficit is taken up by the cornerstone of McCain’s budget balancing promises, “earmarks.” Those are the fire stations and bridges locals want that Congress people scratch each others' backs to fund – sometimes good, like the really needed fire station, and sometimes not so good, like the infamous “bridge to nowhere,” but almost always popular locally. And I do mean the earmarks sliver is teeny, tiny. Real viewer effort is actually required even to see it. Maybe an enterprising reporter will ask McCain how his plan will work when earmarks are only a tiny percentage of the Federal deficit.

In the meantime, DeLong, who says he was mostly an independent before George Bush I, puts the economic issue in a nutshell (emphasis added):

What reason could there be not to vote against a candidate who says he doesn't know very much about economics? Not to vote against a candidate whose two chief economic advisors are Phil "What Problems with Deregulation, You Whiners?" Gramm and Carly "H-P Paid Me $21 Million to Go Away" Fiorina. All signs are that McCain economic policy is set to be much worse than even the George W. Bush policy . . . .

It is not just that economic policy under John McCain is likely to be very bad, it is that economic policy under Barack Obama is likely to be quite good. Barack Obama shows every sign of continuing the moderate Democrat tradition of economic policy--working to reduce income disparities, enhance opportunity, restore fiscal balance, speed up productivity growth, try to fix our health care system, invest in America's future, and engage with the global economy. He is a very smart man with, I think, a very good team of advisors.

On the one had, we have a candidate unengaged with the economy as opposed to a candidate who is. A candidate who gets on the phone with Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina--and who doesn't appear to know that Ms. Fiorina received one of those golden parachutes he is denouncing--as opposed to a candidate who listens to Austan Goolsbee, Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Gene Sperling, and Laura Tyson. The choice seems obvious to me. I'm interested in why it doesn't seem obvious to [everyone else].