Recently, Fortune magazine interviewed both McCain and Obama about the economy. I found one of the questions to be particularly interesting:

Question: What do you see as the gravest long-term threat to the US economy?

Obama: If we don’t get a handle on our energy policy, it is possible that the kinds of trends we’ve seen over the last year will just continue. Demand is clearly outstripping supply. It’s not a problem we can drill our way out of. It can be a drag on our economy for a very long time unless we take steps to innovate and invest in the research and development that’s required to find alternative fuels. I think it’s very important for the federal government to have a role in that process.

I think we can all agree that the price of oil is absolutely detrimental to our economy, and will continue to be so unless something is done. I hope we can also agree that simply drilling for more oil will have a negligible effect on prices (but a large, unnecessary impact on the environment).

The best answer does seem to be alternative fuels, which may cost a lot of money to research, but will certainly pay off in the long run.

But McCain, well, I’m not sure what McCain is thinking. Here’s his answer to the same question:

McCain: Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences.

This is interesting.  It’s true that terrorist attacks could hurt the economy, after all, the attacks on 9/11 did temporarily disrupt economic activity.  And since McCain is talking about threats to “our very existence”, it is also true that a much larger terrorist attack involving, say, a nuclear device, would devastate all aspects of American life.

But lets not stop there.  We can’t ignore the fact that by fighting terrorism (which in McCain’s mind means a war in Iraq and who knows where else), our government spends huge amounts of money abroad that could be spent at home.  This in itself is a blow to our economy, and it also angers the Islamic extremists that plan terrorist attacks.  So maybe McCain should be afraid of terrorists, because he really has no idea how to handle them.

So in the end, we have one candidate who wants to talk about the economy when asked about it, and another who wants to turn these economic questions into “foreign policy” debates (I use the term loosely).  Which one do you think is more in touch?