Listen to this NRP piece from Thursday about McCain and Obama’s interest in boosting foreign aid. The beginning of the piece is transcribed below, but the full clip is just over 4 minutes and worth the listen.

The economy may be in trouble and the budget deficit growing, but supporters of U.S. foreign aid see some promising times ahead. That’s because both leading candidates for president have talked about the need to continue to help poor nations develop.

Every so often at town hall meetings on the campaign trail, Republican John McCain calls on people from a grassroots organization known as the ONE campaign. They ask him what he’ll do to help poor nations fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and illiteracy. McCain has said he sees foreign assistance as a key factor in securing America.

“It really needs to eliminate many of the breeding grounds for extremism, which is poverty, which is HIV/AIDS, which is all of these terrible conditions that make people totally dissatisfied and then look to extremism, particularly Islamic extremism,” he told a town hall meeting in New Hampshire last month.

At a speech in Washington this summer, Democrat Barack Obama also spoke about development aid as a strategic imperative for the U.S. in today’s world.

“I know development assistance is not the most popular of programs, but as president, I will make the case to the American people that it can be our best investment in increasing the common security of the entire world and increasing our own security,” he said. “That’s why I will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion by 2012 and use it to support a stable future in failing states and sustainable growth in Africa, to halve global poverty and to roll back disease.”

McCain has not been that specific about how much money he would spend, but he has set a goal of trying to eradicate malaria in Africa and fight corruption.

Steve Radelet of the Center for Global Development sees a total change in Washington’s attitude about development aid, and he’s hoping this will translate into some real reform….