Bailout Bombs

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 11:19 AM

Maybe John McCain's Republican friends in the House had good reason to vote against the bailout package yesterday, helping send the Dow down 777 points. After all, just about everyone hates this bill.

But to blame it on having their feelings hurt by a Nancy Pelosi speech? When nearly two-thirds of House Democrats voted for the Bush bill and two-thirds of the Republicans voted against it?

I don't know what the impact will be on the markets, but I can't imagine this will be terribly helpful to McCain, who made a great show of huddling with the House GOP last week to try to get a bill passed. As the finger-pointing mounts, will voters blame the Republicans for breaking with a president of their own party or take a pox-on-both-your-houses approach to the dysfunctional spectacle of Washington?

Next time you see congressional leaders say they have a deal in principle, check your wallet. "In principle" is meaningless inside the Beltway.

Look, the idea of massive federal intervention in the free market strikes at the heart of conservative principles. But Bush, Paulson and McCain argued that the specter of a banking collapse was so grave that we had no choice. Their party didn't buy it.

A McCain statement blamed Barack Obama for phoning it in. But -- leaving aside the merits of that argument -- the Dems delivered the votes, 133 Repubs voted no. How exactly is that Obama's fault?

Besides, it was only Sunday that Steve Schmidt was telling Tom Brokaw: "What Senator McCain was able to do was to help bring all of the parties to the table, including the House Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass this."

"When the deal fell apart on the House floor Monday, in no small measure because most of the chamber's Republicans balked at voting for it," says the NYT, "the McCain campaign worked to contain the potential for damage. The first defense was to go on offense.

"Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior McCain adviser, said 'partisan attacks' by Senator Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress had caused some Republicans uncertain about the legislation to turn against it and so had 'put at risk the homes, livelihoods and savings of millions of American families.' The Obama campaign immediately dismissed that response as 'angry and hyperpartisan.' "

USA Today: "Bush's weak political standing even in his own party and sharp partisan divisions in the House may have contributed to the plan's demise, but it was old-fashioned politics that killed the bill. In the end, too many lawmakers weren't willing to risk losing their jobs."

Slate's Daniel Gross: "It's clear that the chaos is poison for the top of the ticket. McCain's poll numbers have eroded throughout September as the financial crisis picked up pace. The volatility in the markets doesn't seem to be doing much for the more volatile candidate in the race. Every time the market falls a few hundred points, Obama seems to pick up support."

Meanwhile, I seem to have kicked up a fuss on the blogs with my column yesterday reporting that CBS has tape of more potentially embarrassing answers by Sarah Palin. These are part of Katie Couric's "Questions" series -- Joe Biden fields the same queries -- and will air Wednesday and Thursday.

I can now report that one of the questions deals with Supreme Court decisions, and that the Alaska governor was unable to name a single ruling other than Roe.

Two days until the great VP debate, the media consensus is that the Alaska governor has a problem.

"Gov. Sarah Palin has lost control of her public image, several top-level McCain advisers said this weekend, and even a baseline performance in Thursday's debate with Joe Biden may be too late to recover it," says Atlantic's Marc Ambinder.

"The decision to sequester Palin from the national political press corps was made with the assumption that the afterglow from her convention speech would last; a month later, even some Republicans are beginning to have a less favorable opinion of her. Her knowledge of policy has seemed at times no more than inch deep, and even admirers have complained that her penchant for returning to talking points sounds artificial. Several times the campaign has had to clean up her remarks for her, such as on Saturday, when she hinted at a view of U.S.-Pakistani relations that was closer to Barack Obama's. Aides questioned why CBS's Katie Couric was given a second interview with Palin after Palin's responses were ridiculed."

Even Mitt Romney says the sequestering strategy ain't working:

"Holding Sarah Palin to just three interviews and microscopically focusing on each interview I think has been a mistake. I think they'd be a lot wiser to let Sarah Palin be Sarah Palin. Let her talk to the media, let her talk to people."

At Right Wing Nuthouse, Rick Moran dismisses Bill Kristol and others who say Palin should simply be liberated:

"I see where a few of my friends on the right are calling for the McCain campaign to 'unleash' Palin and just let her be herself. This is delusional bordering on willful self deception. With Palin, what you see is what you get. There is no hidden genius. There is no glib, down to earth Will Rogers-like cornpone philosopher just waiting to be freed from the McCain campaign's efforts to prep her for the media.

"The Sarah Palin we have seen in interviews -- minus the deliberate cutting and pasting done by the CBS partisans -- is the Palin we got: Unsure of herself, light on facts, and clearly (at the present) over her head on the national political stage . . .

"No one believes McCain chose her because she was qualified to become president 'from day one.' Few are. She was a political choice as all Vice Presidential selections are. But this idea that there is a hidden Sarah Palin just waiting to be 'unleashed' is kooky. She isn't going to suddenly start speaking in complete sentences or stop repeating herself, or give anything save a thumbnail's sketch of understanding when it comes to the issues."

Um -- you really didn't have to do any cutting and pasting to make Palin look bad when she's talking about Putin coming into Alaskan air space.

It didn't have to be thus, says National Review's Byron York:

"Certainly, a significant number of Republicans were discouraged by Palin's performance in the Couric interviews that have already aired. Some Republicans believe the McCain campaign made a fundamental mistake in the Palin rollout by focusing on those traditional broadcast networks. (The only other interview Palin has done was with Sean Hannity on Fox News.) Palin is the person who almost single-handedly repaired John McCain's relations with the conservative base, and a base media strategy might have been a more effective one.

"If, a week or so after the Republican convention, Palin had done a lot of talk radio -- Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Bennett, Hewitt, etc. -- she would have had widespread exposure to the voters most favorably disposed to her. Of course the campaign press corps would have complained, but they would also probably have been forced to use snippets from Palin's talk-radio interviews, which means that what Palin said in a friendly atmosphere would ultimately make its way to an even wider audience, one that includes independents and undecided voters. After that radio immersion period -- starting, say, about now -- Palin would do interviews with everyone."

Time's Joe Klein is unimpressed by Kristol quoting a "shrewd McCain supporter" as saying, "Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted":

"Shrewd, huh? Kristol had the pleasure of Palin's company on a Weekly Standard cruise last year and is clearly smitten. [Actually the cruise stopped in Alaska.] But I'd wonder about the shelf-life of Palin's efficacy as an attack dog, especially now that the American people have come to see her as the incredible -- as in not credible -- vice presidential choice that she is. What Kristol is really saying here is that he wants Steve Schmidt to stop scripting substantive answers to questions for Palin, since that's clearly beyond her capabilities, and resume scripting attacks for her."

What's more, the Huffington Post finds that Palin is not always on message:

"Does Sarah Palin agree with Barack Obama (and disagree with John McCain) on attacking known terrorist sites inside Pakistan? Despite the Republican nominee's recent denial, evidence is mounting.

"While campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Palin commented on the possibility of a unilateral strike inside the country by saying 'if that's what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should.' This came one day after McCain himself, in the first presidential debate, went after Obama aggressively for taking the same position.

"Seeking to downplay her remarks on Sunday, McCain did Palin the disservice of suggesting her musings on the stump were a one-off mistake, reflecting precious little about the campaign's policy. 'I don't think most Americans think that that's a definitive policy statement made by Governor Palin,' McCain said on ABC's 'This Week.' . . . 'She understands and has stated repeatedly that we're not going to do anything except in America's national security interest and we are not going to, quote, announce it ahead of time,' McCain continued.

"But even in her notably brief record of statements on foreign policy matters, Palin has now 'stated repeatedly' something else entirely: the idea that, should intelligence provide an exact location of top Al Qaeda figures operating in ungoverned areas of Pakistan, the United States can take matters into its own hands."

Some, such as Tom Perrotta in Slate, are still trying to pigeonhole Palin:

"In the weeks since Sarah Palin made her entertaining and highly polarizing entrance onto the national stage, journalists have been scrambling to get a fix on her, attaching label after label onto the Alaska governor in the hope that one of them might stick. Is Palin a hockey mom, 'a working-class heroine juggling career and family and living out her religious convictions,' in the words of conservative writer Ross Douthat? Or is she, as Katha Pollitt would have it, 'a rightwing-Christian anti-choice extremist'? Other observers have focused on Palin's appearance, calling her a 'babe' (Rush Limbaugh), a 'MILF' (Tina Fey), a 'stewardess' (Bill Maher), and the ubiquitous 'sexy librarian' (only Google knows).

"The sheer amount of head-scratching expended on Palin might lead you to believe that she's something new and puzzling on the American scene. But she isn't quite as novel as she seems. Caribou hunting aside, Sarah Palin represents the state-of-the-art version of a particular type of woman -- let's call her the Sexy Puritan -- that's become a familiar and potent figure in the culture war in recent years."

I say we just call her governor.

Not long ago, Canada's CBC ran a commentary by Heather Mallick that said Palin appeals to "the white trash vote" with her "toned-down version of the porn actress look," which includes "a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave."

Well! CBC Publisher John Cruickshank is sorry: "Mallick's column is a classic piece of political invective. It is viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan. And because it is all those things, this column should not have appeared on the CBCNews.ca site . . .

"We erred in our editorial judgment. You told us in no uncertain terms. And we have learned from it."

Remember that other debate -- the one between Obama and McCain?

"When the details of this encounter fade, as they soon will, I think the debate as a whole will be seen as of a piece with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Reagan-Carter in 1980, and Clinton-Bush in 1992," James Fallows opines.

"In each of those cases, a fresh, new candidate (although chronologically older in Reagan's case) had been gathering momentum at a time of general dissatisfaction with the 'four more years' option of sticking with the incumbent party. The question was whether the challenger could stand as an equal with the more experienced, tested, and familiar figure. In each of those cases, the challenger passed the test -- not necessarily by 'winning' the debate, either on logical points or in immediate audience or polling reactions, but by subtly reassuring doubters on the basic issue of whether he was a plausible occupant of the White House and commander in chief. I think that's how this debate will be seen."

Fallows definitely has a perspective on 1980, having served as a Carter speechwriter before Reagan won the only debate that year.