Economy & Budget

The failure of the House of Representatives to pass the financial bailout, or, if you prefer, the federal rescue plan, highlighted divisions within both party conferences.

On the Republican side, where more than two-thirds of members voted against the package, the tally is not all that surprising. Conservatives tend to be highly suspicious of such legislation, and in the House, conservatives are organized and active.

More surprising is that some 40 percent of House Democrats defied Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and voted "nay." Read more...

America has heard a lot of talk this month about “meltdowns” and the financial calamities that await us if the Congress doesn’t act soon and with a singular voice that our credit markets are going to be all right.

But have you all been paying attention to what’s taking place off the stock exchange? First it was Bank of America’s announcement that it was buying Merrill Lynch. Then Washington Mutual collapsed and will no doubt get folded into another entity. Then Citigroup bought banking giant Wachovia.

Detecting a pattern here? All the major customer banks in this country are consolidating into so-called superbanks, or the other ‘M’ word — monopolies. Read more...

I know I am being used. John McCain is on a bender, having abandoned Straight Talk for some other kind of talk that is often hard to understand. It has been three weeks running, and he just can't stop. But this is all by design. He is getting me to write this, because if he behaves wildly enough we have to keep writing the What Has Happened to McCain? pieces instead of writing about the Initiation of Sarah. (Most of you are too young to catch that 1978 movie reference.)

Yesterday's failure of McCain's leadership — the bailout package belongs to him if he in fact worked so hard on it after suspending his campaign — sent him spinning around so fast it is hard to know what he said or what it meant. He started by declaring it was no time for blame, then pivoted to this: "Sen. Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into this process." Read more...

Congress once again could not get out of its own way as it failed to pass the critical $700 billion rescue plan.

It seems no one on the Hill is willing to acknowledge the gravity of the financial crisis, because there seems to be no urgency to take the much-needed action to keep our entire financial system afloat. If Congress really understood how crippling this crisis is, they would know that inaction has a price as well.

As the broader stock markets tumbled, more than $1.2 trillion of value was lost — well beyond the cost of the proposed package. Instead, both sides of the aisle are more worried about pushing their agenda and pointing the finger at the other party in an effort to find blame or shirk responsibility. Read more...

This has been a sad week for the country. We have certainly seen more profile, less courage, from presidential candidate John McCain over the past 10 days. When it came time to stand up and put our nation first, as his slogan says, McCain did just the opposite.

But before we get to the economic mess of the day, and McCain’s lack of leadership, one quick point.

Unfortunately, “politics first” has been the story of his entire campaign this year. Who could argue, with a straight face, that putting Sarah Palin on the ticket was “country first,” even before the pathetic national interviews that she has recently done? Totally incomprehensible blathering, which even Republicans have condemned, shows Palin to be out of touch and terrifyingly incapable of putting three sentences together. As the National Review’s conservative columnist Kathleen Parker put it in urging Palin to withdraw, “If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.” Palin ought to head up the “know nothing” party. Read more...

In Barack Obama's first major test in showing leadership of his party as the Democratic presidential nominee, he failed miserably.

As the titular head of the party, Obama was unable to control House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — unable to prevent her sabotaging the bailout bill and utterly clueless that she was going to ensure its failure by making a barn-burning partisan speech that would send many Republicans walking.

As John McCain was encouraging bipartisanship and cooperation and staying involved, Obama was phoning it in — literally — saying, "They can call me if they need me." Meanwhile, his Democratic leadership ran amok and Obama is nowhere to be found. Read more...

The Hill's A.B. Stoddard answers viewer questions about John McCain and Barack Obama's performances in the Presidential Debates as well as McCain's reaction to the current financial crisis.

There was potentially a change in venue and archetype with Sarah Palin. There was the possibility of the awakening of a holistic inner life as when Victoria was queen — to my grandmother and oldest aunties, she was more the mother than their real mothers, and every English person felt a part of her family. Another possibility was of a new Jacksonian populism awakening Alaska-style, which would have been restorative. A republic should every several generations marry to the coyote or artic wolf to retain its original vitality. But McCain is prone to the work of the Trickster and his mercurial play. That alone might have been his motivation for choosing her. However, now that she is here and every manicured and coiffured squid on CNN and in the northeast press is taking shots at her, it could get interesting.

Palin’s mistake was in letting the poltroons who have been composing her recent public appearances — said to have been sent over from Bush’s office; they worship at the altar of Kali, the Death Mother — put her in pants. She wore a skirt and was free, natural, womanly and instinctive at her VP speech and it sent McCain toward the winners circle for the first time in months. And she came in with enough personal references — Dick Morris, William Kristol, David Brooks — to assume that she had at least entry-level ballast as Alaskan governor. Read more...

A scene from the classic movie “Airplane” keeps coming to my head.

The famous conservative commentator Jack Kirkpatrick, who used to do a Point/Counterpoint segment on “60 Minutes,” said this about efforts to rescue the plane from going down: “Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let ’em crash.”

I was getting a little worried that House conservatives were going to take the Jack Kirkpatrick view when it came to our national fiscal crisis: Wall Street bought its tickets, they knew what they were getting into. We say, let it crash. Read more...

The most liberal senator in the United States Senate could not tell us what he would cut or trim in his massive spending proposal package in light of the financial crisis. That is frightening. As John McCain noted in tonight's debate, it is pretty far to travel from the far left to be able to reach across party lines and work with Republicans to solve any issue, let alone a huge financial crisis.

Barack Obama is an eloquent speaker, but he is not very swift on his feet, as exhibited by his clumsy tap dance onstage tonight. When asked by Jim Leher what he would alter in his spending program if elected president, Obama was lost and seemed to be missing talking points on that key point. Read more...