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The fiscal meltdown is yet again the focal point of dueling Democratic and Republican TV ads today. Barack Obama released another two-minute mini-speech on the state of the nation's economy and how he would depart from the approach taken by President Bush for the last eight years. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee's independent expenditure arm is out with a spot lambasting Obama's economic policies, which it says would take the country deeper into economic turmoil.

The RNC's new ad is turning heads for not only criticizing Obama's economic agenda, but seemingly contradicting John McCain's message on the federal bailout. While McCain is still attempting to play dealmaker on Capitol Hill and encouraging Congress to pass the legislation, "Worse" (subscription) attacks the deal in the harshest terms. "Wall Street squanders our money and Washington is forced to bail them out with -- you guessed it -- our money," the announcer jeers. According to Ben Smith, the ad was sent out to TV stations early Monday morning, before the bill tanked.

The ad is slated to run in battleground states Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia. Brad Todd, a partner at OnMessage Inc. who produced the spot, said it was a response to a moment in Friday's presidential debate when Obama (as well as McCain) failed to identify a part of his agenda that he would have to put off because of the budget constraints that the next president is sure to face. "The fact that Senator Obama would still spend nearly a trillion dollars even after Congress addresses the financial crisis is something the American public needs to know," Todd maintained.

In Obama's ad (subscription), the Illinois senator speaks straight into the camera, repeating several now-familiar lines about the failure of the Bush administration's trickle-down economic theory. "We know the truth. It didn't work," he says. Acknowledging that "our economy's in turmoil," Obama still attempts to inject a sense of optimism: "I know that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis." Obama then offers several distinctions between his and McCain's tax plans, emphasizing that he does not intend to raise taxes on the majority of Americans.