Obama places no blame, but...
Posted: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 4:17 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC's Lee CowanRENO, Nev. -- In an interview today with NBC News,
Obama said House Democrats kept up their end of the deal to pass the rescue plan, but did not place blame squarely on the other side.
"I think that, the key now is just to not worry about credit blame publicity, let's just do the spade work to actually get this immediate crisis passed," he said, but added, "There was an agreement between Democratic leader
Pelosi and Republican leader
Boehner in the House that each side was going to come up with a certain number of votes and the Democrats, I think their number was 120 and they came up with 140."
Obama also hinted that had he known earlier the deal was going down to defeat he would have worked the phones even harder, especially given that some of those who voted no, were some of his early supporters.
"At this point, knowing that the Republicans may not be able to muster all the votes they had promised, if we need additional votes to get this done, then I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that that happens," he said, "because I think it's important for the country regardless of what the political alignments are."
While McCain has offered many of the same suggestions of late to help make the bailout more palpable, the Illinois senator said there have been no discussions about offering joint legislation with McCain in the Senate.
"You'll recall that when Sen. McCain suggested he would suspend his campaign and we would go to Washington, it created sort of a flurry of media," he said. "But, what we didn't see is the kind of focus on just getting the job done that was necessary. That's why I've deliberately tried to stay behind the scenes in the work that I have done."
