September 26, 2008--"This Sucker Could Go Down"

Doddering top gun John McCain, watching his poll numbers slip and obviously afraid to go toe-to-toe with Barack Obama in the debate scheduled for tonight, imitating George Bush’s fateful Mission Accomplished appearance on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, parachuted into Washington yesterday afternoon and cravenly, with only his own political future in mind, scuttled the emerging agreement on the economic rescue plan. What Senator Chris Dodd more correctly labeled “the McCain rescue plan.” The only thing missing was the fly-boy suit.

Isn’t McCain’s current political slogan “Putting America First,” which of course implies that Obama puts it second behind his own political aspirations? In what way did Captain McCain yesterday act accordingly?

His stunt was so transparent that even Republicans were annoyed with him for showing up in the Senate, where he’s been AWOL since April, and turning the delicate negotiations, which were clearly making progress, into a self-aggrandizing political circus.

The Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, pretty much inadvertently revealed the political truth behind the stunt, which for him is at best a once-a-year event, when he tried to get away with claiming it was the Democrats, not the Republicans who had done the political posturing.

His top aide put this accusation even more directly while at the same time also leaking the truth. According to the New York Times, that aide, Kevin Smith, said Republicans revolted, in part, "because they were chafing at what they saw as an attempt by Democrats to jam through an agreement on the bailout early Thursday and deny Mr. McCain an opportunity to participate in the agreement." [My italics. Article attached.]

So let the economy collapse into what Nobel Prize winning economist Sarah Palin has already labeled another Great Depression because John McCain isn’t being allowed to take credit for something in which he had no role.

Sorry, I got that wrong—he did in fact play a big part. For years, since his participation in the savings and loan collapse as a member of the notorious Keating Five, and for years as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, he did have a major role in dismantling the financial regulatory and oversight capacity of the government that has contributed mightily to the current economic crisis, a dismantling that our war hero does not have the courage to take any responsibility for.

Now, I do not pretend to understand many of the issues underlying the current crisis, but I do know enough to know that it must be very serious when I read, also in the Times, that Secretary of the Treasury Paulson got down on his knees in front of Nancy Pelosi yesterday after the photo-op White House meeting dissolved into partisan rancor, praying to her not to abandon the rescue plan. He’s the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and I imagine didn’t get to that lofty position through such desperate gestures.

For once President Bush may have gotten it right when, also during that meeting, sensing the deal was unraveling, said, “This sucker could go down.” And he wasn’t talking about Hank Paulson on his hands and knees in the Roosevelt Room.