BAILOUT BACKFIRE

BAILOUT BACKFIRE

McCain's manoeuvring in financial crisis might have backfired
Sheldon Alberts, Washington Correspondent , Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, September 26, 2008

OXFORD, Miss. - John McCain loves to the roll the dice, consequences be damned.

The Arizona senator did it with the Iraq war surge and came out looking like the wise man of American politics when it worked.

He gambled on an illegal-immigration plan that conservative Republicans virulently opposed, and it very nearly cost him the GOP presidential nomination.


People lay underneath the iconic Wall Street bull during a rally in the financial district against the proposed government buyout of financial firms Thursday in New York City. Republican presidential candidate John McCain took a political risk this week by slowing high-stake negotiations on the largest government bailout in U.S. history.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Font:****"I am a betting man," he told NBC News on Thursday.

But McCain has taken few political risks greater than the one he did this week by thrusting himself into the middle of high-stake negotiations on the largest government bailout in U.S. history.

Did it work?

Not by any tangible measure - including the standards for success set out by McCain himself.

When the 72-year-old senator announced Wednesday he was rushing back to Washington to help resolve a legislative stalemate over the financial crisis, he insisted he would remain in the nation's capital as long as it took to craft a deal.

He promised to suspend his campaign, then appeared the next morning at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. And he called for the postponement of Friday's presidential debate "until we have taken action to address this crisis."

Yet there McCain was Friday night at the University of Mississippi anyway, set to debate Barack Obama though no deal had been struck when he left Washington in the morning.

"He is optimistic that there has been significant progress toward a bipartisan agreement now that there is a framework for all parties to be represented in negotiations," the McCain campaign said in a statement.

Translation: Close enough, we're out of here.

So what precisely did McCain accomplish in D. C.?

McCain's chief success was in persuading President George W. Bush to convene Thursday's high-level White House meeting with the presidential candidates and congressional leaders.

Democratic Barack Obama had little choice but to accept Bush's invitation and looked very much like an unwanted guest at someone else's party.

But the meeting itself was an abject failure that descended, by the McCain campaign's own account, into "a contentious shouting match."

Accusations by Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid that McCain's presence was a distraction that helped scuttle a deal should be taken for what they are - pure politics.

But this much is beyond dispute: The lasting impression from the White House meeting was that of a lame-duck president so incapable of forging a consensus on his own that he turned to two presidential candidates for help. Hardly reassuring for Americans in a time of economic peril.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, one of McCain's closest advisers, told the Washington Post that the Republican candidate didn't take a firm position during negotiations, stressing instead that any deal must protect taxpayers and provide assistance for U.S. homeowners.

Other Republicans said McCain sided with the House Republicans who defied Bush's appeals - both publicly and in private - for a speedy bipartisan compromise.

"Clearly, (Thursday), his position in that discussion (Thursday) was one that stopped a deal from, uh, finalizing that no House Republican, in my view, would've been for," said Roy Blunt, the Republican House whip.

Absent the political achievement he had hoped for - McCain to the rescue! - the Republican candidate's best hope is that Americans will view his intervention as a noble but doomed attempt at bipartisan leadership.

He wants to reinforce his own campaign slogan that, no matter the results, he puts "country first."

But there is a huge potential downside. McCain looked very much like a candidate making it up as he went along - employing political tactics without an overarching strategy.

Obama, by contrast, sought to avoid making any waves at all - leaving the sound and fury to others. But at least he was consistent, saying all along that he believed presidential candidates could debate each other while also playing a role in Washington negotiations.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a McCain supporter, said Friday his candidate made a "huge mistake" by proposing a halt to the debate in the first place.

"You can't just say, 'World, stop for a moment. I'm going to cancel everything'," Huckabee told the Associated Press.

If anything, McCain's actions reinforced the perception - which firmly took hold with his last-minute selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate - that he prefers making decisions more out of gut instinct than cautious deliberation.

For McCain, the stakes couldn't be higher. With the U.S. economy in the tank and Palin's political star dimming, McCain's poll numbers were slipping ahead of his actions this week. The latest Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll shows Obama with 50 per cent support to McCain's 45 per cent.

In economically troubled Michigan - a key election battleground - one poll shows Obama up 13 points.

McCain may well have decided he needed another game-changing event to shake up the presidential campaign. It worked, but possibly not to his advantage.




© Canwest News Service 2008