On January 20, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. And like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did as he took the White House while facing the Depression, he'll have to make it up as he goes.

The nation should know before Obama replaces George W. Bush much more of what he plans to do for the economy and business. Sure, there are his myriad campaign proposals, like raising the top income tax rate and capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest earners, or taking a new approach to trade agreements that emphasizes labor and environmental standards. But this promises to be a transition like no other, or at least like any other since 1932 when that economic crisis dominated the transfer of power.

Well, John McCain didn't waste any time. In response to the first question of the second presidential debate, the Arizonan offered to buy back any mortgage in America that's worth more than the value of the home.

Since maybe as many as 40 percent of the homes in America may be under water -- that is, the mortgage is worth more than the home -- that's quite a tall order, one that makes the $700 billion bailout/rescue plan look like bubkes. It's a stunning nationalization of mortgages, wild in its cost and implications and somewhat bizarre coming from someone who had tried to pare back Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I suspect in the coming days McCain will dial back the plan because it was so outlandishly expensive and such a federal intrusion into the market--not that we're still worrying about that.

J. Jennings Moss reports: Remember Charles Keating? Barack Obama's presidential campaign hopes so. But just in case you don't, the campaign today released a 13-minute online documentary about the poster child for the savings and loan crisis of nearly 20 years ago, and of John McCain's involvement in it.

The video, "Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis", was posted on a special minisite, KeatingEconomics.com, shortly after noon EDT.

Okay, Sarah Palin didn't implode. Her sentences, however meandering, found their way to a period. Joe Biden doesn't have Tourette's Syndrome. Neither screwed up terribly in their one and only debate Thursday night. And Palin did far better than she's been doing in recent interviews where she left one longing for the gravitas of Dan Quayle.

But let's be honest. Both were dishonest in a fundamental sense. Both of these vice presidential candidates left the impression that they could offer a lot of benefits to the middle class. Biden, the Democrat, repeated the 95 percent of Americans getting a tax cut pledge from Barack Obama's campaign. Palin left a similar impression that she and Republican John McCain could bestow benefits on a beleaguered middle class.

As the corpse of the bailout bill lies at the feet of the House of Representatives, everyone -- Republicans and Democrats on the Hill, the Bush administration, presidential campaigns -- has expressed a determination to go back to the table. There's one catch: No one agrees on the fundamentals.

Treasury has been wedded to a plan that's built around the federal government buying distressed assets from beleaguered financial institutions. But that is precisely what two-thirds of House Republicans oppose and why on Monday they voted against the bailout package that their president went on national television to sell, that their nominee suspended his presidential campaign to promote, and than even their top renegade leaders came to support.

Over the weekend, I thought the left-right opposition to the Bush administration's $700 billion bailout plan would grow. Freemarketers didn't like it, and neither did Democrats who saw it as corporate welfare. I was pretty confident it would pass. Now, I'm not as sure, despite the bipartisan leadership of Congress being for the measure.

Republicans are being encouraged to walk away. Patrick Ruffini, the former webmaster of the Bush/Cheney '04 race, and founder of Thenextright.com has encouraged Republicans to vote no and so has Newt Gingrich. Could the president lose more than half his party on this one? In the House, I think so. In the oh-so-adult Senate, I'm less sure but the opposition of Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, might bode opposition from others. I guess I'd still bet that it's going to make it out the door this week, but that's not a totally foregone conclusion. In time, something is gonna pass because the markets will revolt and Congress will get pushed into some kind of measure.

As the markets melt down, Barack Obama and John McCain sound a lot alike.

Both of the presidential hopefuls are criticizing lax regulation and Wall Street greed, while they're both declaring the situation a mess (although McCain first offered an assessment that the economy is fundamentally strong, a point that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg also made yesterday). Jackie Calmes, formerly of The Wall Street Journal and now of The New York Times, has an informative piece today about the two men's record on these issues.

Matt Cooper reports from St. Paul: If you didn't know anything about John McCain's economic views before the Republican convention, you may not know a lot more now that he's given his acceptance speech.

The convention was big on national service and reform and McCain's own compelling life story and that of his running mate, Sarah Palin. But the economic message was spare in the prime-time hours. Those of us in the hall or C-SPAN nerds at home, who sat through the lesser speakers, got to hear more. But the major speeches were sparing in the time they spent on economics, and that was true of the finale.

Matt Cooper reports from St. Paul: The television networks had worried that the Republican convention might not be a ratings winner. Not any more. TV producers I've spoken with here at the G.O.P. convention expect huge ratings for vice presidential pick Sarah Palin's speech to the R.N.C. tomorrow night.

It should be especially good news for News Corporation's (NWS) Fox News Channel, the choice of conservative-leaning viewers. But it should also be good news for CNN, a division of Time Warner (TWX), and General Electric's (GE) MSNBC, a division of NBC-Universal. We'll have to see. Nielsen did not do convention ratings last night because the proceedings were over for the evening and the cable networks were all about Hurricane Gustav.

T. Boone Pickens is here [at the site of the Democratic Convention]. I saw him at The Big Tent, the venue sponsored by Google (GOOG) and Digg, and the base camp for many of the bloggers at the convention. The billionaire repeated the basics of his "Pickens Plan" to promote natural gas and wind power to wean America off of foreign oil.

The most interesting thing was Pickens' presence here at all. Four years ago, he was one of the financial backers of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that dealt a mortal blow to John Kerry's presidential bid. Today, Pickens says he's politically neutral. He's pitched his plan to Barack Obama and John McCain, both of whom have expressed support for some of the ideas in the plan.

Matt Cooper reports from Denver: Like everyone else, business leaders are going to watch Barack Obama's address on Thursday night as he accepts the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. I think it's worth keeping in mind a few things.

The first is that we have the broad outlines of Obama's economic philosophy. As David Leonhardt in The New York Times argued and as I did earlier this year, Obama's got some basic liberal tendencies—higher taxes on wealthier earners, expanded government programs with some more market oriented ones. I don't think we'll get any new surprises tomorrow.

Is everyone else finding this energy debate as depressing as I am?

In a tit-for-tat that now involves Paris Hilton, John McCain and Barack Obama have been going at each other over drilling and tire gauges. Meanwhile, the House Republicans are staging a '60s-style sit-in demanding that Speaker Nancy Pelosi reconvene the chamber so they can vote on more offshore drilling and a larger energy package. It's totally amusing, especially since oil prices are coming back down to earth. The whole debate has the feeling of a conversation that's coming too late, like you're at a dinner party and long after the discussion has moved from kids to care, you pipe up about little Johnny's school.

If you're trying to talk an insane person off a ledge, you're going to do everything you can to calm them down and get them to come inside. You're not going to remind them that, well, their life does kind of suck and they have to take more responsibility for the mess they find themselves in. That would not be a good idea.

When you have an economic mess like the one we're in now--falling housing prices, a credit crunch, unstable capital markets, and whacked-out energy prices--you need a big cup of calm. And the housing bill that passed the House of Representatives this week should provide some chamomile tea (if not Xanax) for a jittery economy.

The fallout from the collapse of Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) stock continues. Yes, the markets have rebounded somewhat. A little good financials news here and there has prevented another freefall, just like with the Bear Stearns weekend of doom earlier this year. But we're in a weird time. J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) announces that its income fell 53 percent and the stock soars - because it all could have been so much worse.

In this atmosphere, it's easy to lose track of the big goal with any Fannie Mae assistance plan. The goal is not just to help Fannie and her little brother, Freddie Mac, through the next few weeks, but hopefully to come up with some kind of prescription that will avoid any crises in the future.

I've been worried about Fannie Mae (FNM) for a long time. A few months ago I wrote a column about it. More than ten years ago, when it was riding high, I was worried, too. Now I'm really worried.

Fannie always seemed to me to be built on the worst of propositions--private profit and socialized risk. What was supposed to be a nimble hybrid, the ultimate public-private partnership, represented the worst of both worlds.

Alan Greenspan tries to distance himself from the current financial mess in remarks today. I read his remarks in the middle of the night and will give them another read later. Amidst the turgid prose he seems to blame the whole thing on poor credit risk models that don't take into account the oddities of human behavior. Uh, wouldn't have been better if we'd had some regulation as the subprime market grew?

The problem wasn't the low interest rates, which some have unfairly blamed, for being the cause of all of this. It was the total lack of regulation that allowed a crazed market to grow crazily. What's worse, the Washington system of regulation of the credit markets, built for an age when Thurston Howell was the typical millionaire has grown into a wild, unchecked casino that the Nevada Gaming Commission would never tolerate.

Not long after Barack Obama entered the presidential race last February, there appeared on YouTube a parody of the famed 1984 Macintosh ad in which Hillary Clinton was portrayed as Big Brother. It all seemed a bit heavy handed at the time, but in the months since the Apple analogy has grown stronger and not weaker. Apple stock more than doubled last year as the company became the sine qua non of hip and cool. Its white-background TV ads gently mocked the PC-and-Microsoft world rather than treating it as a totalitarian ruler.

Isn't that the same cool-and-confident tone that Obama had shown in recent months? He derides the Clinton campaign (where my spouse is a senior advisor) and belittles it gently but devastatingly. I had enough confidence in Apple last year to buy some stock when it was at $75 but as it approached $100 I dumped it, fearing that it couldn't rise any higher. Oops. It went on to $200.

I'm not a stock picker. I've put all my money in index funds. I've never worked on Wall Street. But why wouldn't you buy some New York Times (NYT) stock right now?

The yield is 5.6%. It's around its 52-week low. It's selling for around $16, when it was at $50 in 2001 and around $35 just over two years ago. The market cap of the company is around $2.3 billion, which is what a lot of PE firms leave in their desk drawer.