For the first time Monday I heard John McCain comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter. I had heard this before in other arenas, but not from McCain. I guess that despite these two presidential candidates pledging to the American people to bring change and resist politics as usual, they are both, as usual as one could get.

Obama is being shaped by the pressures of running for office and to believe otherwise is delusional. I suppose one has to have hope but the effects of the campaign are becoming clear. Obama has been painting McCain as an extension of Bush, which is nonsense, and now in a typical tit-for-tat response, McCain is filling the air with Carter references.

Both McCain and Obama are wrong in their assessments of their opponents and they are becoming commoners to resort to the bottom of the barrel campaign techniques used in every campaign for most of our nation's proud history. Obama gave up the high ground too easily and McCain has decided he can sling mud with the best of them.

Stick to the issues fellas, or neither one of you will have any credibility left to fight the inflation, sinking dollar, war, oil & food prices, federal deficit, trade imbalances, national infrastructure, health care and Social Security nightmares and a multitude of other issues one of you will be saddled with.

How will either affect stock prices. The market is full of assumptions. If McCain wins, the defense sector, energy, health care, financials and high yielding stocks are probably better bets. Some examples are:

• Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH)
• Chevron Corp (NYSE: CVX)
• Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM)
• General Dynamics Corp (NYSE: GD)
• Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS)
• JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM)
• Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC)
• Pfizer (NYSE: PFE)
• Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN)

If Obama wins, better bets might be alternative energy, high-tech, consumer staples, retail and non-dividend paying stocks (think taxes). Some examples are:

• Automatic Data Processing (NYSE: ADP)
• Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE)
• Avon Products (NYSE: AVP)
• Black and Decker (NYSE: BDK)
• Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO)
• Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO)
• Costco Wholesale (NASDAQ: COST)
• Kraft Foods'A' (NYSE: KFT)
• Suntech Power Hldgs ADS (NYSE: STP)

These are just a few stocks from among those that have been reviewed on BloggingStocks and not current recommendations. They are just meant to give a little flavor to what I sense as market sentiment, and to stimulate some discussion.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money.