An excerpt from Mark Anderson's blog on the Strategic News Service, which argues that McCain is not only superfluous to brokering a deal--he isn't even part of the committee--but that he is exploiting it, an opportunity to politicize what transcends this small man's personal goals. In short, he is using this as an opportunity to aggrandize himself, even though he is doing nothing and is unimportant to the entire situation.
"September 25th, 2008
It’s hard to be a hero, when no one wants you.
Imagine, John McCain talks George Bush into having a special meeting of just him, George, Obama (which will make him look like he is being beckoned), and a few Congressional heads, to sort out the big mess.
Only problem: it was already sorted out.
Then, a few hours late from his campaign speech at the Clinton Initiative in NYC, McCain shows up. Unfortunately, he has a whole new document in hand, that no one, not the president, not the cabinet, not the taxi driver, has seen before.
As Reid put it later: we had a deal, and then McCain showed up.
McCain NEEDS dissension, so he can look like a leader. He also needs an excuse to prevent him from showing up at the debate with Obama, where he will probably lose.
Most important, he needs to show the far right that he is NOT Bush.
So, decrying campaing politics, he uses Bush to call an un-needed meeting, while the real negotiators are doing really good work, then he shows up, blows up the meeting, blows off Bush et al., and — the country is nowhere, and he creates a situation in which he now can say that he must really skip the debate, because, thanks to him, there really is no deal.
In some races, there is a disqualifying behavior. Cheating, for instance. If this presidential campaign were a footrace in Somalia, McCain would be drawn and quartered.
Cheating is bad."
And the NY Times' view is that Congressional Republicans remain skeptical of McCain's "helpfulness" in resolving this crisis, the single largest financial bailout proposed in US History, which will essentially create an "Economic Czar" with NO oversight.
"Mr. McCain’s advisers cast his role on Friday as a supportive, essential presence to Republicans who were enraged by what they considered their harsh treatment at the White House on Thursday afternoon, and the dismissive attitude of their Republican colleagues in the Senate. They also tried to push back against a narrative that emerged Thursday, which portrayed Mr. McCain as injecting partisan politics into delicate dealmaking, and replace it with the image of a presidential candidate who stopped a bad deal from going through...many House Republicans remain deeply skeptical of Mr. McCain, and it is not clear whether he would have had the clout to change any minds in the Republican caucus. One of Mr. McCain’s own advisers said Friday that the financial crisis found the senator working with people who were “not historically his closest friends on Capitol Hill.”
Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, said that “if McCain came out and said, ‘Here’s a deal that I like,’ that would be significant.” But when asked if lawmakers would back a deal just because it had Mr. McCain’s support, Mr. Kingston said: “Not so much. This becomes a vote of conscience. It’s a vote of principle.”
Finally, why is it that no one notices that, once again, the Bush/Cheney axis is proposing another significant governmental move that increases BIG GOVERNMENT without regulation.
With our civil rights continually being whittled away, we should be more vigilant about the "package" being proposed now.
As for McCain, do we really want someone who thinks that all that matters today is to appear as hawkish as possible regarding the Iraq war, hoping that no one will notice that he was WRONG about the war, and that he will "cut spending."
Did no one notice he has no plan. For anything?
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