McCain: Hope and resolve
Posted: Thursday, October 09, 2008 9:07 AM by Carrie Dann
The Washington Post’s Balz writes that McCain’s candidacy right now is a little like the declining stock market. “Lack of confidence breeds retreat. He needs an injection of fresh political confidence.” Yet Balz continues that Team McCain has been in this position before. But inside the McCain campaign there is resolve, which comes from the candidate himself. Whatever difficult days lie ahead, they believe they have seen worse. McCain put it best in his closing statement Tuesday: "I know what it's like in dark times. I know what it's like to have to fight to keep one's hope going through difficult times. I know what it's like to rely on others for support and courage and love in tough times. I know what it's like to have your comrades reach out to you and your neighbors and your fellow citizens and pick you up and put you back in the fight."
“The homeowner assistance plan that Senator John McCain announced without detail in the presidential debate Tuesday night,” the New York Times writes “would allow millions of financially stretched Americans to refinance their mortgages with government help, but it would leave taxpayers to cover the losses, rather than the financial institutions that hold the original mortgages. Mr. McCain said in the debate that the program would be expensive, and on Wednesday his chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, acknowledged that the liability would be borne directly by taxpayers.”
Politico says McCain “made an overnight change in the homeowner bailout he proposed at Tuesday’s presidential debate, making it more generous to financial institutions and more costly for taxpayers. McCain's staff says it was always meant that way.”
A Washington Post editorial also points out that the proposal “would benefit borrowers and lenders who made bad decisions and, at least as Mr. Holtz-Eakin described it, it lacks a clear mechanism for reassembling and extricating whole mortgages from the welter of securities "tranches" into which Wall Street slices and dices them.”
George Will writes the pre-McCain obit. "When cranky, as he frequently was, Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver would shout at an umpire, 'Are you going to get any better or is this it?' With, mercifully, only one debate to go, that is the question about John McCain's campaign." Pivoting off McCain's bailout proposal, Will adds, "Still it may be politically prudent for McCain to throw caution, and billions, to the wind. Obama is competitive in so many states that President Bush carried in 2004 (including Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico), it isn't eccentric to think he could win at least 350 of the 538 electoral votes."
