Not that I’m an expert, but I’m guessing that comparing a candidate’s economic policies to those of the president who presided over the biggest financial collapse in US history isn’t exactly a compliment.

Asked what she thought of John McCain’s proposal to fix the mortgage crisis at her Greenburg, PA media avail, Hillary Clinton said the plan “sounds remarkably like Herbert Hoover, and I don’t think that’s a good economic policy” — adding that it would cause “a downward spiral that would cause tremendous economic pain and loss in our country.” Check out the rest of her response on video below.

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Los Angeles, CA — Sen. John McCain is set to deliver a major foreign policy address this morning where he will emphasize the need for the US to be a good world citizen and listen to world opinion if the country expects to be listened to.

“When we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic, or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them,” he is expected to say. “America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model. How we behave at home affects how we are perceived abroad.”

Here is a short excerpt from the prepared text (full text after jump):

In such a world, where power of all kinds is more widely and evenly distributed, the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone. We must be strong politically, economically, and militarily. But we must also lead by attracting others to our cause, by demonstrating once again the virtues of freedom and democracy, by defending the rules of international civilized society and by creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish. Perhaps above all, leadership in today’s world means accepting and fulfilling our responsibilities as a great nation.

One of those responsibilities is to be a good and reliable ally to our fellow democracies. We cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves, and we do not want to. We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact — a League of Democracies — that can harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests.

At the heart of this new compact must be mutual respect and trust. Recall the words of our founders in the Declaration of Independence, that we pay “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed. We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic, or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them.

America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model. How we behave at home affects how we are perceived abroad. We must fight the terrorists and at the same time defend the rights that are the foundation of our society. We can’t torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured. I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control.

There is such a thing as international good citizenship. We need to be good stewards of our planet and join with other nations to help preserve our common home. The risks of global warming have no borders. We and the other nations of the world must get serious about substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years or we will hand off a much-diminished world to our grandchildren. We need a successor to the Kyoto Treaty, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner. We Americans must lead by example and encourage the participation of the rest of the world, including most importantly, the developing economic powerhouses of China and India.

While he has previously emphasized the importance of diplomacy at times on the trail–the collective impact of the above section sends a powerful message—-an olive branch from a McCain White House to the world and veiled jabs at Bush foreign policy and the perceived damage it has done to the US relationship with it’s allies.

Also, the topics he hammers on a daily basis–Iraq and the war on terror—are pushed back into the last 1/3 of the speech . He takes a very sweeping, macro-look at the major issues facing the world, choosing to discuss AIDS and Africa, China/India, diplomacy and Latin America all before he gets to Iraq.

Though he does connect Iraq and the America as a good world citizen riff towards the end with this notable line:

“Our critics say America needs to repair its image in the world. How can they argue at the same time for the morally reprehensible abandonment of our responsibilities in Iraq?”

I will post some video excerpts after the speech.

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Bel Air, CA — Former First Lady Nancy Reagan endorsed Sen. McCain outside her home Tuesday afternoon, providing the presumptive GOP nominee with the official blessing of the closest thing to the party’s royal family.

“This is an important, most important kind of expression of confidence and my ability to lead the party that I could have,” McCain said, who often refers to himself as a “foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution.” He lauded the 40th president and former first lady for their lifetime of “honorable and courageous service.”

Mrs. Reagan, 86, who Reagan library officials said did not plan to speak at the appearance, chimed in on a question directed at McCain about why she chose to prematurely endorse before the convention.

“Let me inject in here. Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided and then we endorsed. Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party,” she said as she patted him on the arm. (Full Event Transcript after Jump)

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Santa Ana, CA — Sen. John McCain called for a cautious approach to the current economic situation, criticizing Democratic proposals for increased government intervention as he laid out his economic principles before a group of Golden State business leaders.

“I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers. Government assistance to the banking system should be based solely on preventing systemic risk that would endanger the entire financial system and the economy,” McCain said in a speech before about 300 small business leaders before taking questions from the group. “Any assistance for borrowers should be focused solely on homeowners…(and) must be temporary and must not reward people who were irresponsible at the expense of those who weren’t.” (Full remarks below)

While noting that he is open to “any and all proposals” and he will not “allow dogma to override common sense,” he dismissed Sen. Hillary Clinton’s proposal for the creation of a $30 billion federal fund to buy out troubled mortgages.

“I am open to ideas. That idea, I believe, is a very expensive one. I don’t believe it works. And I’d like to know how its paid for,” McCain told reporters after the event.

McCain also expressed optimism during the roundtable that he is “hopeful that the worst is over,” noting that yesterday’s housing reports showed a “little glimmer of hope.”

“I believe I can tell you that I think that perhaps we are seeing the worst of…(the) subprime lending crisis which then led to the collapse or dramatic fall..in home values,” he said. “I think we may be seeing the beginning of the end of that.”

Among the immediate policy proposals McCain called for Tuesday:

• the nation’s top mortgage lenders to meet and “do everything possible to keep families in their homes and businesses growing.
• top accounting professionals to assess current systems.

The initial remarks took on a more formal feel than most McCain campaign events–with the AZ Senator delivering prepared remarks using a teleprompter.

At an availability later Tuesday, Clinton responded to McCain’s speech as a plan for “further inaction.”

“It sounds remarkably like Herbert Hoover and I don’t think that’s a good economic policy. We have a framework of regulation, it needs to be updated and modernized. The government has a number of tools at its disposal that are well-suited for just this situation,” she said. “I think that inaction has contributed to the problems we face today and I believe further inaction would exacerbate those problems…I don’t think it’s an adequate response to say the government shouldn’t be helping either banks or people because I think that would be a downward spiral that would cause tremendous economic pain and loss in our country and I don’t see why we should wait by for that to happen.”

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Sen Clinton admitted to misspeaking when she said she’d been “under sniper fire” during a landing at a military base in Bosnia in 1996 — but denied that her comments represented a pattern of embellishment.

“I just disagree with that,” she said. “I made a mistake. I had a different memory, and my staff and others have all kind of come together trying to sort [it] out.”

Clinton has been under more metaphorical fire for her claim last week that snipers had forced her to run to her car, head down, instead of holding a planned welcoming ceremony at the Tuzla base — when video from the event clearly shows her shaking hands with well wishers and greeting an 8 year old girl on the tarmac.

While the campaign says she merely misspoke at an event in Washington last week, the Obama campaign sent out three separate events in which Sen Clinton mentioned running from the plane because of sniper threats — arguing that Clinton was misleading, not misspeaking.

Clinton now says that while she may have been fuzzy on the details, there were definite security concerns. “We were very much told by the Secret Service and the military that we were going into a war zone, and that we had to be conscious of that,” she said. “We certainly did take precautions. There is no doubt about that and I remember that very clearly. But I did make a mistake in talking about it the last time and recently.”

“That happens, it proves I’m human,” she said. “Which, you know, for some people is a revelation.” She later said she was joking when she told a Pittsburgh radio station that it was her first misstatement in 12 years, telling the press corps to “lighten up. I say millions of words every week, and theres’ a lot more room for error when you’re talking as much as I’m talking .”

Trying to move past the incident, Clinton argued that the discussion should be about the foreign policy credentials of the two Democratic rivals. “Look, this is really about what policy experience we have and who’s ready to be commander in chief, and I’m happy to put my experience up against Senator Obama’s any day.”

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After weeks of silence and a lot of questions answered with “you’ll have to ask Senator Obama about that” Hillary Clinton has decided to speak up on the Rev Wright controversy — telling the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review “He would not have been my pastor.”

In a wide ranging interview, Clinton told the paper’s editors “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.” She called anti-American remarks by Sen Barack Obama’s pastor “hate speech,” saying “I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving.”

Obama spokesman Bill Burton responds “If Senator Clinton has decided that she now wants to play politics with this issue, that’s her disappointing choice, but it won’t do anything to help us solve the larger challenges facing this country.”

UPDATE: HRC came prepared to a media avail following her Greenburg, PA event on Social Security — reading from a paper statement when asked about her Wright comments.

“I’m just speaking for myself, and I was answering a question that was posed to me,” she said, “but i think given all we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor.”

She refused to answer any questions about what Obama should have done, or whether her comments meant that she would make a similar case to superdelegates, saying only that she was answering a question on what she would have done in similar circumstances.

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Chula Vista, CA– Sen. John McCain slammed his Democratic rivals Monday for their continued calls for withdrawal from Iraq despite what he says is clear evidence that the effort on the ground is succeeding.

Citing an audio tape released last week by Osama bin Laden in which the terrorist leader stressed the importance of an al Qaeda victory in Iraq, the presumptive GOP nominee said Sens. Obama and Clinton “refuse to understand what’s being said and what’s happening.”

“General Petraeus is correct when he says that the central battle ground in the struggle against Al Qaeda is Iraq and Osama Bin Laden just confirmed that,” McCain told about 200 attendees at a town hall meeting in Chula Vista—his first since returning from a week-long trip to the region. “So General Petraeus and I and Osama Bin Laden are in agreement. It is hard to understand why Senator Clinton and Senator Obama do not understand that. I don’t know if its naïveté or what the problem is, but it’s obvious that they are dead wrong and they are wrong when they say we should leave Iraq immediately.”

In a tape first aired by al-Jazeera Thursday, bin Laden said that “Iraq is the Jihad theater that would lead to the liberation of Palestine. The Jihad in Iraq should be supported in order to liberate Palestine.”

McCain lauded progress he said he witnessed on the ground in Iraq last week, adding that it shows “the surge is succeeding and it’s time that (Democrats) acknowledged that the surge is succeeding and the benefits of success in Iraq will spread through the Middle East, including a stable society, a stable government, a bastion of Democracy–flawed but functioning.”

The Democratic National Committee was quick to respond this afternoon, attempting to draw a distinction between McCain and Petraeus. Noting that while the top American General said last week that “Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences,” McCain failed to put any pressure on the Iraqi government during his visit, said DNC Communications Director Karen Finney.

“McCain continues his pattern of parroting the Bush Administration’s misleading rhetoric on the war. General Petraeus was right to point out that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress the surge was supposed to make possible, yet John McCain’s only plan for Iraq is 100 years of President Bush’s open-ended commitment to a failed strategy,” Finney said. “The brave soldiers fighting in Iraq don’t need another Republican president who talks about trusting General Petraeus then ignores his advice.”

Chula Vista, CA — Just back from his trip to Iraq, Sen. John McCain focused Monday on the progress being made on the ground during a San Diego-area town hall meeting without commenting on the news today that the U.S. has lost 4,000 soldiers in the conflict.

During a subsequent media availability, McCain was asked why he did not mention the latest milestone in the five-year war. The presumptive GOP nominee said he honors the troops every day.

“I have commented on hundreds of occasions of the sacrifice the great and brave, young Americans have made in Iraq and elsewhere in the world in the struggle against radical, Islamic extremism. I wear a bracelet on my hand…not only as a symbol of the sacrifice that a brave young man named Matthew Stanley made, but that…of 4,000 other brave, young Americans who have served and sacrificed as well. My thoughts and my prayers go out to those families every day, not just on the day that 4,000 brave, young Americans have sacrificed. And I have said that repeatedly on hundreds of occasions.”

McCain focused Monday on the importance of winning the current battle with insurgents in Mosul, adding that he doesn’t believe he will change the current strategy from the one President Bush is pursuing in Iraq.

During an interview with a Philadelphia radio station yesterday, Barack Obama was asked to clarify remarks he made about his grandmother in his speech on race Tuesday, where he addressed his complex relationship with his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe,” he said candidly of his maternal grandmother.
When explaining the remark a few days later during the radio interview, Obama said, “The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away, and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

Many pundits and commentators pounced, denouncing Obama’s use of the phrase “typical white person” as racially charged. Watch his response at a press availability today to those accusations below.

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Note Obama volunteered volunteered the part of his answer on what he did and did not hear during Reverend Wright’s sermons that he considered to be “controversial.” He’s also gotten criticism from “conservative commentators” about another line from his Philadelphia speech on race, when he said, “Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy?  Of course.  Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church?  Yes.  Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views?  Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”