However, after he and Missouri’s Republican Gov. Matt Blunt finished denouncing ACORN as a “fraudulent, law-breaking organization” — for a more balanced assessment of what ACORN does, look here — Davis answered a question from MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell about why the McCain campaign has not been saying much lately about the stock market.

John McCain talked yesterday at length about what he’s trying to do to help stem the financial crisis that exists today, and announced on Monday and talked aggressively every day since then about his new mortgage proposal. There’s very little a candidate for president, and frankly, after watching today, very little even the president can say about what’s happening in the stock markets other than to hope that they correct themselves.

I think John’s recommendation for the government to get involved with the purchase of mortgages before they default is probably the best elixir for doing that. Obviously, I can’t imagine a situation where, on a daily basis, a campaign would put out statements related to whatever the market was doing. We hope the market gets better. We think we’ve got the economic policies that, if John McCain is elected president, will improve the markets because they will actually add stability to the financial system that is in so much turmoil today…

I don’t know if you really want to turn a campaign into a CNBC news show on the stock market. It doesn’t mean that we don’t care and aren’t trying to something about it. It’s just I’m not exactly sure what you’d say every day.

Well, I have an idea of what you might say.

You get out there and you demonstrate that you’re engaged with what’s going on. You reassure people that you understand that their IRAs and 401(k)s lost a substantial percentage of their value in the last week. Even if you don’t necessarily have any idea what to do about the crashing stock market, it’s probably best to at least talk about it — rather than spend all your time trying to gin up phony controversies about your opponent that nobody really cares about anyway.

Now, I have to go. The McCain campaign has scheduled another conference call about Bill Ayers.