Team McCain has a new ad out this morning, and perhaps on any other day it would look more effective. With the release of Barack Obama’s remarks to NPR from 2001 demanding redistribution on a vast scale, though, this looks more like a placeholder:

The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they? I’ll make the next four better. I know your life savings have been hit hard, but we’ll rebuild them.

Barack Obama wants to increase taxes on your savings. You can’t afford that.

He’s quite a talker. But that’s just bad judgment.

First, the last eight years have actually worked pretty well — it’s the last year that hasn’t.  That failure didn’t come from the Bush administration’s policies, but from more than ten years of government distortion of the lending markets, pushed by Democrats.  Until the housing bubble popped and took out Wall Street with it, we had experienced several years of economic expansion and low unemployment that actually worked rather well.  The “last eight years” tic does nothing but reinforce Barack Obama’s message.

Otherwise, the ad isn’t bad at all.  It features McCain speaking directly to voters, always his best mode.  It stays on the economy, which is where McCain has to try to win this election.  It just lacks punch — but that may be coming.

Team McCain needs to have its candidate using clips from that NPR interview to explain how Obama would recreate the Fannie/Freddie mess on an even larger scale through massive redistributionist distortion of private markets.  They need to make that commercial and run it everywhere, and fast.