I don't know, but I suspect that Republicans think we Obama-voters are thinking this about the collapse of AIG and Lehman brothers:

I can't wait until President-for-life Hussein Obama X puts these people all up against the wall and expropriates their funds to pay for slave reparations.

So instead, Republicans propped up a collapsing bubble with unwise policies, aided and abetted by financial industry lobbyists. Interestingly, those lobbyists compose most of John McCain's senior campaign staff, as well as his economic advisors.

There are a few Republicans who see how this could backfire on McCain, but I don't think they get the depths of the problem. It isn't just that McCain is inextricably linked to the very people who got us into this mess, nor that he denies that there's a mess (heck, he's still got 11-14 houses, so how bad can it be?). No the problem comes from Social Security.

In the wake of the roaring economic growth of the Clinton years, a lot of conservatives thought they could destroy FDR's legacy by privatizing Social Security. Let people invest their own money, and you divert funds away from the fund which pays current retirees, so that people would be afraid that the system wouldn't exist any more, and would therefore invest as much as possible in stocks, until there was no Social Security fund left, and retirees could go back to the salad days of the Great Depression, when retirement doomed you to poverty and starvation.

Fortunately, Democrats in Congress stood firm against efforts by John McCain to divert the nation's retirement fund into risky investments back in 2000, and did so again when Bush and McCain rolled out the same idea in 2005. Then the economy collapsed, and it became obvious why we need to keep Social Security safe.

John McCain wants to gamble away your retirement security net on the stock market. That may have sounded smart during the tech bubble or the housing bubble, but it was a stupid idea then, and an even worse one now.

(note: Most of this was written several days ago, then sat in my hopper while events moved ahead. Links are now outdated, but nothing that's happened changes this very basic point.)