The McCain campaign just came out with a statement that blames Barack Obama for the defeat of the proposed bailout in the House today. While McCain's decision to "suspend his campaign" to go to Washington seemed not to have had a helpful effect on the initial round of negotiations over a bill, his campaign nevertheless argues that the partisan attacks of Barack Obama, who kept a greater distance from the negotiations, have now put people at risk of losing their homes.

The McCain campaign also uses the Obama "phoned it in" attack again, presumably because Obama never announced a "suspension" of his campaign.  read more »

“I am writing in frustration over the tenor of the general coverage on McCain this past week,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, top economic adviser to the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, wrote in a blast e-mail to financial reporters over the weekend.

One could be forgiven for thinking he was talking about the events of Tuesday, Sept. 16, when he was briefing reporters in Miami on his candidate’s prescriptions for solving the Wall Street crisis, and burnishing his candidate’s credentials as former chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

What, one reporter asked, had he done on commerce that gave him expertise on the present financial meltdown?

“He didn’t have jurisdiction over financial markets, first and foremost,’’ Mr.  read more »

On the McCain campaign conference call this morning, which was almost as long as some of the Clinton calls have been, Doug Holtz-Eakin and Carly Fiorina said that the Democratic candidates “mischaracterize” John McCain’s position on the economy.

“To describe McCain’s position as ‘do-nothing’ and ‘stand back and watch,’” former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Fiorina said, “is politics of the worst sort.”  read more »