McCain's Stunt

As of Tuesday, McCain hadn't seen Paulson's three page plan issued on Saturday.



You think someone could have briefed him on it?

On Wednesday morning McCain said he cleared his schedule to deal with the financial crisis, though it seems he still met with a doner.

And yet on Wednesday afternoon McCain announced the crisis was so huge he was suspending his campaign to return to DC to help negotiate a settlement. Obviously he wanted to use all that expertise on the topic he had. He also announced that the Friday debates should be delayed. The pundits respond with dismay. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said he was crawling into a corner with his blanket.

He cancels visit on David Letterman (filmed in the afternoon), telling him he needs to get on a plane; but instead McCain goes on CBS News with Katie Couric.

Wednesday night, Obama and McCain released an innocuous joint statement. It's not clear how it came about. But Obama wanted to include five principles: oversight, protecting taxpayers, preventing executives from profiting from taxpayer money, prevent foreclosures, and no earmarks; and Bush said essentially the same thing in his speech, but McCain didn't agree to them.

On Thursday the Huffington Post reported that the campaign was still operating. "Across the country, McCain campaign offices are up and running, accepting volunteers, conducting phone banking, literature dropping and other GOTV activities. This held true on a local, state, and even regional level. The Huffington Post called up 15 McCain-Palin and McCain Victory Committee headquarters in various battleground states. Not one said that it was temporarily halting operations because of the supposed "suspension" in the campaign. Several, in fact, enthusiastically declared the continuation of their work. Others hadn't even heard that the candidate for whom they were devoting their time had officially stopped campaigning."

On Thursday it seems there's a deal. Though perhaps not all the Republicans are on board.

A White House meeting on Thursday afternoon was apparently called by McCain. Lots of people attend.

Update: "At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting."

It ends with some work to do as Republicans aren't happy. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) who's been at the center of all this says it does no good “to be distracted for two or three hours by political theater.”

And it seems both McCain and Obama are taping interviews on all three network newscasts tonight.

Meanwhile McCain economic Advisor (and AEI nutcase) Kevin Hassett spouts partisan nonsense at Bloomberg that the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis. Larry Tate rips it to shreds. citing his biases, his past mistakes, his cherry picking of his data, and exaggerating it to the point of lies and lying about the supposed bill that McCain created and it's fate.