Mighty Mouse McCain adds no value to bailout talks

Yesterday, McCain said he was 'suspending' his campaign to fly back to Washington to negotiate the financial markets bailout plan. Senators have been debating the $700-billion bailout bill all week long without any help from McCain so imagine their suprise at his announcement. McCain, who hasn't cast a vote in the Senate since April, isn't a member of the Banking Committee, which is negotiating the deal, and has admitted the economy isn't his strong suit, is swooping in to save the day (or more accurately, try to save himself from declining poll numbers). Here's how Rep. Barney Frank (D. Mass), chairman of the House's Banking Committee, described McCain's involvement;

"He's been irrelevant to the process. He remains to be. I was afraid that his dropping in here, like Andy Kaufman's Mighty Mouse -- 'here I am to save the day' -- I thought that would slow things down. I didn't see any sign of our Republican colleagues paying any attention to him whatsoever."

So what value did McCain add? By all accounts, absolutely none. After McCain's announcement yesterday that he was rushing back to Washington, he actually stayed in New York to do an interview with Katie Couric and then lingered until late this morning to give a speech at Bill Clinton's Global Initiative. McCain flew to Washington and arrived early afternoon to learn that a tentative deal on the bailout had already been reached. Despite the fact that McCain had nothing to do with the agreement, his spokesperson Tucker Bounds (who I'm beginning to think is a half-wit) had the gall to take credit. During an interview today, he said:

"Before John McCain suspended his campaign yesterday, the situation that we're looking at today looked very different then. After he showed leadership and called for bipartisanship, for us to partisanship aside and tackle this solution head on, here we are. And we're going into a debate, I think we're going there strong."

Besides being an outright lie, since the agreement was reached before McCain set foot in the Capitol, Bounds must not have gotten the memo that McCain still hasn't agreed to attend the Presidential debate. The McCain campaign is quickly coming unhinged - thanks mostly to McCain's rash decisions and false bravado.