McCain gets blamed for angry end to Bush's bailout meeting

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McClatchy Washington Bureau

Congressional negotiators' carefully-crafted agreement on a $700 billion rescue plan threatened to unravel Thursday as lawmakers at an often tense White House meeting clashed over details.
As Republican presidential nominee John McCain looked on, House Republican Leader John Boehner raised concerns that the plan would be too costly to taxpayers, and offered an alternative plan.
Democrats were mad.
"What this looked like to me was a rescue plan for John McCain," said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd of the Republican objections.
His reference was to McCain's eleventh-hour intervention in the negotiations, when he declared he was suspending his campaign and postponing Friday night's debate with Democrat Barack Obama to help negotiate a bailout plan.
Democrats think that Republicans were backing away from a compromise many of them agreed to earlier Thursday -- without McCain's involvement -- in order to give McCain time to play a role and perhaps appear as a rescuer.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he believed the breakdown was simply an effort to allow McCain to miss Friday night's scheduled debate with Obama.
Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, seconded that belief. "I think McCain was hurting politically," Frank said. "I think this was a campaign ploy."
When McCain arrived in Washington to discover that an agreement was near, Frank said, it became necessary to upset it so that McCain could later be seen to have played a role. "He's making it harder to get things done," Frank said.
Republicans, in contrast, said there reservations on the bailout plan were principled. The plan, they said, had too much government involvement in private industry and too high potential liabilities for taxpayers.
"That agreement is obviously no agreement," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., as he emerged from the White House meeting.
The lawmakers spoke after spending an hour in what was supposed to be a somber show of bipartisan unity at the White House. The session, hosted by President Bush and featuring the two presidential candidates as well as House and Senate leaders, came hours after the Democratic and Republican negotiators had issued a one-page "agreement on principles."
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The Arizona senator is not a member of the Senate Banking Committee, has never been influential in setting congressional financial policy, and was not involved in the negotiated agreement in principle.
Said Sen. Reid: "Anyone who tried to understand what John McCain said (at the White House) couldn't."

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