After wishing the crowd of about 100 supporters a happy Rosh Hashanah, Obama said he appreciates how the holiday provides an opportunity for people to asses their lives. “Are we right with each other and are we right with God?” he asked, according to the pool report. Obama also recounted how he addressed a group of 900 American rabbis in a conference call this month.

Turning to the campaign’s quotidian drama, Obama told donors, who paid $2,500 to attend the initimate gathering, that an election full of “twists and turns” was finally bearing down on serious challenges facing the country:

One of the wonderful things about having such an extraordinary election process is that I’ve seen all the cycles of ups and downs, twists and turns… You couldn’t have written a novel with all the crazy stuff that has happened in this election. It seemed like an eternity – three or four weeks ago – when people were calling me and fussing, “We’re talking about lipstick and pigs. What’s happening? This is terrible.”

I said, “My suspicion is that it’s going to turn once again… No matter how many times you shuffle the deck, what you keep on coming up with the fact that this is a serious time. It requires serious leadership.” (emphasis added)

Then Obama walked out to address a crowd of 28,000 people waiting in a plaza between the library and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

While Obama’s aides have militantly rebuffed the idea that his candidacy benefits from the financial crisis — aiming to avoid accussations of politicization — the frame of a “serious time” anchors the Democratic nominee’s new stump speech.

Meanwhile, since the conventions, Sen. John McCain has excelled, if at all, via The Politics of Shiny Objects. He serves up compelling events that did not actually occur — from the lipstick lie to the “suspended” campaign — to distract many reporters, and some voters, from news that might hurt McCain, (like declining polls, economic news and revelations about the lobbyists running his campaign).

Lipstick drama is clearly harder to sell as banks crumble, and voters seem to have welcomed Obama’s “serious” approach to the economic crisis.

At the risk of overinterpreting his remarks today, it seems that Obama thinks “serious leadership” remains his best theme. It certainly meets the moment.

Biden, as well as Sen. Barack Obama, was introduced by Denise Ilitch, former president of a company that managed the Detroit Red Wings. She is “the first lady of Hockey,” Biden told the crowd. Ilitch gave both Biden and Obama Red Wings jerseys, and said the Democratic ticket would be as successful as the local team — which won the Stanley Cup last year.

After warming up the crowd, Biden went from jocular to scolding. He blasted Sen. John McCain for being disingenuous and out of touch on the economy. “John didn’t see the light, John saw the polls,” Biden said, recounting how McCain lurched from pushing deregulation to supporting stricter financial regulation and oversight on Wall Street.

Turning to national security, Biden knocked McCain for pledging to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell. “He does not live in Iraq,” Biden said. He promised that an Obama-Biden administration would target bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan — and actually “send him to hell.”

Pursuing terrorists in Pakistan is an issue for both campaigns this weekend. Sen. John McCain walked back a statement by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that appeared to support Obama’s aggressive stance on crossing the border to pursue terrorists when Pakistan will not.

Obama with Sen. Carl Levin (MI) on a trip to Michigan this month. (Credit: Obama Flickr)

When Obama took the stage, he reprised the hockey theme, asking supporters if they had any extra tickets for the coming season. Then, leaning forward over the lectern, Obama emphatically waved a voter registration card, urging the crowd to register their friends in a push for the final week of registration in Michigan. The Obama campaign indicated that it had 20,000 registration forms on hand.

Speaking from a teleprompter, Obama delivered his post-debate stump speech, which hammers his priorities for the bailout plan and chastises McCain as a latecomer to Democratic solutions to the financial crisis. “You can’t make up for 26 years in 26 days,” Obama said, urging voters to scour McCain’s record serving the causes of deregulation and corporate America.

Rebutting McCain’s debate line about Obama’s inability to understand the issues, Obama boiled down the point. “No I understand — you want more of the same.” The Democratic nominee continued, “eight years of this nonsense is enough,” relentlessly pressing his case that McCain is a Bush clone.

McCain’s response to the financial crisis, Obama added, was “Katrina-like” — reflecting a stunning lack of awareness, let alone urgency, in tackling a crisis for regular Americans.

Obama was introduced by a former Republican with a very Republican name, John Ashcraft, who lost his job in January. Ashcraft explained that he decided to change gears and back Obama because he will fight for middle-class Americans.

In a direct knock against McCain’s personal fortune, Ashcraft said he was part of the majority of voters “who know exactly how many houses we have, because we’re struggling to pay the mortgage.”

The Obama campaign is now attacking McCain's personal wealth.

Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the country (TWI background here). Economic woes are even becoming a concern in Oakland County, an affluent area to the west of Detroit’s suburbs that was once reliably Republican. Sen. John Kerry won the county of 640,000 voters by a scant 3,000 last cycle. Obama must do well here to keep Michigan blue.

The Democratic nominee was clearly on a tear Monday night. He blasted McCain for outlining economic “policies that are identical to George Bush’s.”

He ridiculed Gov. Sarah Palin – her name swiftly drew boos – for claiming she is a change agent. “What are they talking about? How do they have the nerve to say it?” he asked, tweaking the Republicans for co-opting his “change” mantle with “empty words.”

Mary Farmer, 79, who said she was seeing Obama speak for the first time, agreed with the crowd’s antipathy for Palin. “I think McCain made a big mistake,” she told me, “[Palin] is too young, she’s not experienced, she has very little [to offer].”

Turning more solemn near the end of his address, Obama raised the Iraq war as an economic disaster, just as he did Monday morning before a labor audience in Flint.

“Why are we in Baghdad spending $10 billion [a month]?” he asked. “Why aren’t we building in America?” He was energetic and loose throughout the evening remarks, drawing more laughter and cheers than his morning message event in Flint.

In response to an audience question about civil liberties, for example, Obama delivered a rousing riposte — one part Dirty Harry and one part Justice William Brennan Jr.– savaging the Bush administration for failing to catch bin Laden and slamming right wingers for abandoning the rule of law.

“Don’t suggest that its un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up for over 200 years,” he declared, drawing more applause from the crowd.

It is the first time Obama has used that line, which was well received by the union-heavy crowd of more than 300 people, according to the Flint Fire Dept.

Obama singled out Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a false prophet of change, tweaking her for being for the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she was against it.

“You can’t just make stuff up!” he told the largely middle-aged crowd. “You can’t just reinvent yourself,” he added, arguing that the GOP ticket cannot offer change when it promises the same Republican policies on taxes, health care, education, ethics and rebuilding American infrastructure.

MI Gov. Granholm has been stumping for Obama.

Obama spoke while standing in front of three large hybrid sport utility vehicles — he told voters  an Obama administration would build cars in Flint, not Japan — and beneath a giant American flag. He took some questions from the friendly crowd, discussing military spending, Fannie Mae, Social Security and economic challenges. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Congressman John Conyers accompanied Obama, but did not speak at the event.

Obama’s speech focused on populist economics, and he repeatedly linked ending the war in Iraq to renewing the U.S. economy.

Today Obama heads to Flint, Mich., for an economic discussion at the regional technology center of a local community college.

Obama at a Chrystler plant on previous MI visit.

As Michael Moore documented almost 20 years ago, Flint is the kind of town that gets sold out by CEOs and neglected by politicians. The major job losses hit decades ago, but Flint’s population is still in free fall — it recently dropped 8 percent, to 114,000 people. Over the past three decades, the deciannual census counts show the population steadily dropped more than 10 percent.

Even as it thins out, this blue-collar base is essential to keeping Michigan blue. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry ran up his numbers to 60 percent in Genesse County, anchored by Flint, and eked by statewide at 51 percent. According to one report, Flint’s voters were rated the 10th most reliably liberal in the country — just behind San Francisco.

But Obama’s Michigan message is not all job losses and mortgage nightmares. The campaign will tap a local worker-turned-student, Jon Terbush, to kick off today’s event. Terbush, using money from a buyout after 12 years with American Axle, now is attending community college to brush up on technology and auto repair, according to a backgrounder from the campaign. Such voters have few reasons to re-up on Republican economics, as The New York Times explained today:

[T]he principal elements of Mr. McCain’s economic agenda on taxes, trade, regulation and health care follow the philosophic outlines of a deeply unpopular Bush administration. In offering new, immediate economic benefits, Mr. Obama has far outbid his Republican adversary… [Obama] has offered an ambitious range of proposals to arrest that decline and help average workers compete in a global economy.

Those proposals include a new tax credit of $500 per worker, or $1,000 for two-worker households; a new mortgage-interest credit, valued at an average of $500, for homeowners who do not itemize their tax deductions, and a college tuition subsidy of $4,000 per year for students who agree to perform community service. Mr. Obama would wipe out income taxes for older Americans earning $50,000 or less, saving some 7 million households an average of $1,400 apiece.

That’s on top of the still-unspecified subsidies Mr. Obama would provide for the purchase of health insurance for those who don’t now have it, the elimination of capital-gains taxes for small start-up businesses and an increase in the existing dependent-care tax credit that could save $1,100 for a single parent of two children who earns $40,000…

The Times reports that McCain, in contrast, is putting far less on the kitchen table:

By comparison, Mr. McCain’s list of proposals on this front is far more modest. He would double the existing child exemption to $7,000 from $3,500, but most tax-filers would not benefit because they have no dependent children or have incomes so modest that they already do not owe income taxes. Mr. McCain, of Arizona, would also offer a summer gas-tax holiday valued at about $30 a month.

Here on Obama’s plane, which is about to make the 40-minute hop from Chicago to Michigan, there’s little economic talk. Early this morning, Obama donned a White Sox cap and dropped off his daughters at their first day of school, then squeezed in a gym visit before boarding “O Force One.”

The schdeule promises a long day, with two events in Michigan and then a trip to Ohio — where Obama will continue to press for blue-collar support.