Conrad Black scores McCain for his terrible campaign
When he interrupted his campaign to return to DC to manage the economic crisis, McCain was onto a winning streak. But he blew it.
President Bush did his best to manage the financial crisis in a way that would have enabled John McCain to turn it to his advantage, but the candidate missed his great chance.
His hare-brained week, starting with the Herbert Hoover quote that the economy is "fundamentally sound," ranks among America's greatest attempts at political suicide.
On succeeding days, he raved like King Lear against greed, demanded strangulating financial regulations, urged the firing of Chris Cox, (the best SEC chairman in over 20 years), and concluded by "suspending" his campaign to return to Washington and "fight" for the rescue bill the Republicans then rejected.
McCain should have pounded the cabinet table, made the bailout his own, and sold it as a method of driving a hard bargain for the taxpayers while making the impetuous and avaricious pay for their mistakes.
Unless McCain stages the greatest comeback since Lazarus, (and there were twitches of life in the last debate, so that should not be ruled out), this farrago of blunders will rank alongside Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" (1964), George Romney's claim he was "brainwashed" in Saigon (1968), McGovern's demand that Nixon propose more humiliating terms for the US to withdraw from Vietnam than Hanoi was asking for (1972), Carter's encounter with the nasty swimming rabbit (1976), Dukakis's joy-ride in the battle tank (1988), and John Kerry's assertion that he had voted for the Iraq War but then voted not to fund the armed forces (2004)....
Read entire article at Conrad Black at the Dailybeast.com (blog)
President Bush did his best to manage the financial crisis in a way that would have enabled John McCain to turn it to his advantage, but the candidate missed his great chance.
His hare-brained week, starting with the Herbert Hoover quote that the economy is "fundamentally sound," ranks among America's greatest attempts at political suicide.
On succeeding days, he raved like King Lear against greed, demanded strangulating financial regulations, urged the firing of Chris Cox, (the best SEC chairman in over 20 years), and concluded by "suspending" his campaign to return to Washington and "fight" for the rescue bill the Republicans then rejected.
McCain should have pounded the cabinet table, made the bailout his own, and sold it as a method of driving a hard bargain for the taxpayers while making the impetuous and avaricious pay for their mistakes.
Unless McCain stages the greatest comeback since Lazarus, (and there were twitches of life in the last debate, so that should not be ruled out), this farrago of blunders will rank alongside Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" (1964), George Romney's claim he was "brainwashed" in Saigon (1968), McGovern's demand that Nixon propose more humiliating terms for the US to withdraw from Vietnam than Hanoi was asking for (1972), Carter's encounter with the nasty swimming rabbit (1976), Dukakis's joy-ride in the battle tank (1988), and John Kerry's assertion that he had voted for the Iraq War but then voted not to fund the armed forces (2004)....