Founding Editor Bob Kuttner is joining us on TAPPED with commentary about his new book, Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, and on economic issues in the campaign.
On Thursday, John McCain pledged to end partisan rancor. On Wednesday, his running mate, Sarah Palin, and the rest of his crew did everything possible to stir it up. This will evidently be the nice-cop/bad cop act through the campaign.
As if to rain on McCain's parade, the August unemployment rate hit 6.1 percent, the Labor Department just announced. That's the highest rate since 1993, except for a brief spike in the summer of 2003. Drilling down into the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the news only gets worse. Monthly job losses were 84,000 in August, worse than expected. The number of long term unemployed rose by twice that number, to a total of more than 1.8 million.
