McCain scrambles after bailout failure

When Hank Paulson’s $700bn bail-out bill was rejected on Monday, no politician stood to lose more than Senator John McCain. Over the last week McCain had focused his entire campaign on the legislative passage of the bill.

Before the House of Representatives rejected the bill however, McCain was already taking credit for helping in its creation, and slamming Barack Obama for obfuscating. "I've never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I'm not going to stop now," McCain told a rally in Ohio on Monday morning. "Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn't want to get involved. Then he was monitoring the situation."

McCain campaign chief strategist Steve "the Bullet" Schmidt was equally generous in overstating McCain’s role in the bill’s creation: "What Senator McCain was able to do … was to help get all of the parties to the table… Senator McCain knew time was short and he came back, he listened and he helped put together the framework of getting everybody together".

As soon as the bill failed however, Doug Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor for the McCain campaign, issued a statement in which he blamed Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for sabotaging McCain’s efforts to save America. "Their partisan attacks were an effort to gain political advantage during a national economic crisis," he said. "By doing so, they put at risk the homes, livelihoods and savings of millions of American families... Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain, and refused to even say if he supported the final bill".

The "phoned it in" comment is particularly ironic considering that when McCain went back to Washington over the weekend he literally “phoned it in” from his campaign headquarters in Virginia, instead of taking part directly in Capitol negotiations.

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic believes that neither candidate has come out of the financial crisis looking good: "Neither presidential candidate took a firm position, although one of the candidates riskily suspended his campaign and intervened, without intervening", he writes. "That intervention failed; he is now blaming his opponent and Nancy Pelosi via a spokesman and bemoaning the gridlock in Washington with his own lips."

McCain was "by turns action-oriented and impulsive as he dive-bombed targets", while Obama was "measured and cerebral and inclined to work the phones behind the scenes," according to Patrick Healy in the New York Times. Healy also writes that to many Republicans, who opposed the $700bn bill from the very start, McCain looked "impetuous in a moment of crisis" - one minute suspending his campaign, the next calling for the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission to be fired.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, believes that when the next bout of negotiations for a rescue bill come around John McCain will be forced to keep a safe distance. "He pirouetted into Washington to resolve matters and he pirouetted right back out to resume his campaign," he says in the New York Sun. "It would be ludicrous and it would look desperate to re-suspend his campaign". Last week, says Sabato, McCain "staked some of his prestige on suspending his campaign to fly to Washington to prove that he could make this thing happen. Well, it didn’t."

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 30, 2008