It depends on what you consider solid. If you look at his plans and listen to his speech Obama is advocating light regulation to allow the market to correct inequities, and he places the blame for job losses on lobbyists stifling competition:
I think all of us here today would acknowledge that we've lost that sense of shared prosperity. This loss has not happened by accident. It's because of decisions made in boardrooms, on trading floors and in Washington. Under Republican and Democratic Administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both.
This loss has not happened by accident. It's because of decisions made in boardrooms, on trading floors and in Washington. Under Republican and Democratic Administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both.
That is why the pro-business publications like Fortune and Conrad Black's right-wing NY Sun, which you link to approvingly, prefer Obama's plans. That is why Mayor Bloomberg introduced Obama for today's speech. It is also why Obama has such a tough time in working class states like PA. Workers and left of center economists like Paul Krugman do not like Obama's plans, and prefer Clintons, because Clinton recognizes that market forces cannot achieve universal health care or correct the growing income disparity.
This is a pro-regulatory stance. Obama is placing blame squarely on "practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices". That's the opposite of a free-market approach; a free-market approach would allow such practices.
Remember that Bill Clinton (not Congress under Bill -- Bill, by executive order) set the state for Enron by allowing accounting rules to be set up that allowed for things like Enron. Remember that deregulation is not solely a Bush-era phenomena, that Clinton set into motion quite a bit of deregulation.
The support that Obama is getting from that side of the table is based on an understanding that our system has become entirely too unbounded. We've dabbled with disasterous underregulation; we don't need to dabble with disasterous overregulation (not that I'm saying that Hillary Clinton is a vote in that direction).
However, Obama is in fact much better positioned to create new regulations and stabilize the system, because he is beholden to far fewer big-money donors and interests than is Clinton. His economic plan draws so much support from labor organizations because it focuses on improving labor conditions, wages, salaries, and trade agreements in labor-centric ways, and because he focuses on reregulation in ways that are actually likely to improve economic conditions.
