John McCain rushed to claim credit for passage of the bailout bill just hours before it failed. The Politico's Mike Allen describes it, correctly, as a strategic blunder.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition – hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked.McCain has been striving for days to politicize this crisis to his advantage. He has been posturing as a leader while doing nothing more than disrupting the legislative process. Today was a burlesque expression of his crass political instincts as he claimed credit for negotiating the bailout prior to the vote, and then blamed Obama for its failure immediately following the vote. He is trying to have it both ways.
The rush to claim he had engineered a victory now looks like a strategic blunder that will prolong the McCain’s campaign’s difficulty in finding a winning message on the economy.
Shortly before the vote, McCain had bragged about his involvement and mocked Sen. Barack Obama for staying on the sidelines.
That's not change we can believe in. That's the same old two-faced politics that McCain claims to disdain.
