When John McCain swoops, people duck.

posted by The Vidiot @ 7:35 AM Permalink

So, he had to rush back to DC to muck things up, not fix things.

Sen. Chris Dodd, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said Thursday that bipartisan meeting with President Bush at the White House on the mortgage rescue plan was nothing short of a disaster. In an interview on the CNN cable news network, Dodd described a meeting in which Democrats were blindsided by a new core mortgage proposal from House Republicans, with the tacit backing of Republican presidential candidate John McCain. "I am not going to sign on to something I just saw this afternoon," he said. Dodd said Republicans and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had to decide what they wanted to support. The whole meeting "looked like a rescue plan for John McCain," Dodd said. He said he was simply going to pretend that the meeting had never happened.

Now, I'm not for the bailout and there's a part of me that actually appreciates McCain going in there and pooping on the process. And maybe if I believed he was doing it because he thought it was a bad idea, like these 200 or so economists who signed on to a letter decrying the bailout as a mistake, I might think more highly of him.

But as I said in my previous post below, McCain's stance on this bailout has as much to do with the economy as leprechauns have with reality.

Update: I was right, it is just political theater:

During the late afternoon meeting at the White House (a meeting which was McCain's idea), McCain sat silently at the table until nearly the end, according to a Hill source who was briefed on the meeting. At that point, I'm told, McCain vaguely brought up the proposal being pushed by the Republican Study Committee, the group of House conservatives that is bucking the GOP leadership. But McCain didn't offer any specifics and didn't necessarily advocate for the plan, according to the Hill source.

In other words, he's thrown his lot in with the conservatives going against the Bush party line. THIS is how he plans to differentiate himself from the Bush administration. Since he agrees with Bush on Iraq, social security, hell, on just about everything, he MUST do something different than what Bush wants to set himself apart. And he will use this differentiation like a bludgeon from now until the election. But like I said, it may turn the bailout into a bust, which I think is a good thing in the long run, (short run? it will suck big nasty green apples) but his motives are all wrong.

Labels: Economy, John McCain, pol