No Thanks, John

Another Dangerous Bailout

[A] Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up—the sky was full of them—and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber. It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection—the air speed was about 500 knots.
I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake.

-John McCain, recounting his bailout from a Skyhawk dive bomber on Oct. 26, 1967, in a story that originally appeared in the May 14, 1973,
issue of U.S. News & World Report.

With the news today that Republican presidential nominee John McCain wants to stop campaigning and delay the debates so he can focus on the economic crisis, he unwittingly embarks on another in a long line of dangerous bailouts, with the latest having the most dire consequence of all—transforming the image of McCain from war hero to candidate coward.

McCain’s first well-known bailout occurred over the heart of Hanoi on October 26, 1967. The Navy flier ejected from his downed dive bomber only to sustain crippling injuries, face capture and spend 5½ years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam. This experience has earned McCain the mantle of “war hero.”

Today, McCain abruptly suspended his campaign to turn his attention to another dangerous bailout—Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s $700.0 billion plan to assist the American financial system. As Paulson and Bernanke struggle to justify this massive expenditure of taxpayer money, legislators are justifiably growing increasingly aggressive in their rolling interrogation.

However, for all of his sudden urgency to get to plannin’ and a’ regulatin,’ Senator McCain acknowledged on Tuesday that he had not even read the administration’s three-page bailout proposal.

As recently as the September 21st episode of 60 Minutes, McCain defended deregulating Wall Street as “helpful to the growth of our economy.”

In fact, Sen. John McCain has spent much of his two decades in Congress pushing deregulation, despite his election year flipflop toward more government control of the economy as the nation faces one of its greatest financial crises since the Great Depression.

Regardless of what McCain knows (or so obviously does not know) about what got us into this financial mess and how to get us out, neither he nor Obama are the prime movers and shakers in the Senate on the issue of a financial bailouts. Any assertions by the Republican candidate that his campaign suspension, debate dodging, and return to Washington “to set politics aside…and earn the confidence of the American people,” is anything more than a political stunt should be as tough a sell to the American people as Lehman Brothers stock options.

In fact, in an interview today with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, eloquently called McCain’s move to return to Washington as “just weird.” “We haven’t heard hide nor hair of Sen. McCain in these negotiations,” said Schumer, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. “He has not been involved except for an occasional, unhelpful statement, sort of thrown from far away, and the last thing we need in these delicate negotiations is an injection of presidential politics.”

As The Huffington Post’s Matt Littman put it, “I can see it now—all the Wall Street head honchos, the Treasury folks, the political figures, the markets—all waiting to hear from the guy who just last week was shouting, “All is well!” and today, his running mate says that unless we enact a bailout fast, we’re headed toward a Depression.”

But as McCain injects presidential politics into this dangerous bailout, he proceeds with his most tricky ejection of all—removing himself from the presidential race now as a ploy to save his campaign in the home stretch. Instead of genuinely looking at any bailout proposal, economic data, or finance policy, McCain obviously only read the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll that shows him down by nine points. In turn, he responded today by pulling that familiar ejection lever yet again, this time on his downed StraightTalk Express, bailing out of a losing race and in the process, losing the respect of an already captive American public.

And in the end, the McCain campaign, blown apart by it’s own cynicism, is now in that familiar inverted, almost straight-down spin, headed for crippling results, with nothing heroic to glean from the wreckage.

— Jen Jones