Dodd: McCain and House GOP trying to force their own bill

  Original Article

by FleetAdmiralJ  Thu Sep 25, 2008

Watching Dodd getting interviewed on CNN and basically said that the meeting with the President was a bust, and that many of the issues that they thought were resolved were suddenly brought up again by the House GOP, apparently with the support of John McCain, with some hints that Secretary Paulson may be interested in their plan.

Dodd was obviously not happy with this, basically insinuating that if they wanted to bring up an alternative plan, they should have done so at the start of the week, not after everyone has spent a week on this one deal.

Dodd also now doesn't think a deal will be done by tomorrow, and if the House GOP plan picks up steam, then it may not be until at least the end of next week until anything gets out.

My own thought on this is this: John McCain knew that the House GOP was reluctant to support the bailout bill, just because they tend to be ideologically opposed to government spending, period.

As a result, McCain took this opportunity to come in and show the House GOP a plan he thought they would like, and then came and crashed Bush's party by basically using the House GOP as the messenger to bring his new plan to the table.

In other words, he is literally trying to undue an almost done deal with seemingly everyone agreed on just so that he can come in and "save the day" by trying to force his own bill into the picture.

Of course, this also has other implications as well, including the fact that there is almost no way a deal will be reached by tomorrow night's debate, and there is a possibility that no deal may be reached even by next Thursday's Vice Presidential debate, giving them an excuse to skip out.

If I were Obama and the Democrats, this is what I would do:

Continue working on the current framework, but if it appears by the end of the day tomorrow that you just aren't going to get the House GOP votes you need to give yourself cover, then dump the plan and start working on your own from scratch.

Then next week we can have a battle - in Congress - between Obama's plan and McCain's plan and they can duke it out there.

Update

Commenters are now reporting that Senator Corker (god I still can't believe he won) also said that they had a deal going in, and that it was blown up afterwards.  He, of course, tried to do it while being nicer to McCain, but that was the jist of it.

Update 2

Obama on CNN:  Deal was done before he and McCain arrived and then "something happened."  Obama also notes that the negotiations may be getting bogged down due to the introduction of Presidential politics.

   So does this mean that McCain has tossed aside his " Country First " campaign slogan? He most surely is not putting his country first. I'm shocked, I tell you.

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