By MIKE ALLEN
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.
Shortly before the vote, McCain had bragged about his involvement and mocked Sen. Barack Obama for staying on the sidelines.
“I've never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I'm not going to stop now,” McCain told a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “Sen. Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn't want to get involved. Then he was monitoring the situation.”
McCain, grinning, flashed a sarcastic thumbs up.
“That's not leadership. That's watching from the sidelines,” he added to cheers and applause.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior policy adviser, told reporters on a conference call that McCain "dedicated the past week" to addressing the problem but made "a conscious decision not to attract attention to John McCain."
"He's made dozens of calls," Holtz-Eakin said.
Asked if McCain bears any responsibility for the bill's failure, Holtz-Eakin said McCain "improved it greatly — took the lead in the need for taxpayer protections."
Making a similar point earlier on MSNBC, Holtz-Eakin said McCain deliberately "kept a low profile."
"John McCain understands that had he looked like he was going to be the key to the success, that Democrats would attack him and kill the deal," Holtz-Eakin said. "That's what you saw today. They were not going to let John McCain do the job that he was trying to do: deliver a bill that would help the American people."
"John McCain understood that had he kept a low profile, talked with members of Congress as he did, asked them where they were in their votes, called those members who were reluctant. He was doing his job, and doing it with a low profile [that was] necessary," Holtz-Eakin added.
Holtz-Eakin told MSNBC that Obama was "phoning it in" instead of working hard on a rescue. "Where was Barack Obama for today?" Holtz-Eakin said. "He's phoning it in — phoning it in — one more time."
McCain initially had been modest about his role. On Sunday, he said on ABC’s “This Week” that congressional negotiators deserve “great credit” for the bipartisan deal. “"It wasn’t because of me,” McCain said. “They did it themselves.”
But at almost the same time, McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt was saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “What Sen. McCain was able to do … was to help get all of the parties to the table. There had been announcements by Senate leaders saying that a deal had been reached earlier in the week. There were no votes for that deal.
“Sen. McCain knew time was short and he came back, he listened and he helped put together the framework of getting everybody to the table, which was necessary to produce a package to avoid a financial catastrophe for this country.”
On Monday morning, McCain campaign communications director Jill Hazelbaker said on Fox News that the deal would not have happened “without Sen. McCain.”
“Sen. McCain interrupted his campaign, suspended his campaign activity to come back to Washington to get Republicans around a table,” Hazelbaker said. “Without Sen. McCain, House Republicans would not have appointed a negotiator, which would not have moved this bill forward.
“It’s really Sen. McCain who got all parties around a table to hammer out a deal that hopefully is in the best interests of the American taxpayer.”
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