Sen. Lindsey Graham ventured to the Capitol late Thursday night in full damage-control mode.
“The only reason I’m here tonight,” he told reporters, “is to try to let America know that this whole narrative that John McCain was coming here with some motive to blow up a deal that would save America is just politics at its worst.”
Judging from Graham’s defensive posture, whatever the politics were, they weren’t the sort that the McCain camp thought it was winning.
It’s too soon to judge McCain’s speedy return to — and speedy exit from — Washington.
A bailout deal could still come together — or not — and because McCain hasn’t yet said publicly what he’s for or what he’s against, he could be in a position to claim credit or escape blame for just about anything that happens.
Either way, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) says his friend was right to get involved.
“It was the right thing to do, the gutsy thing to do, because if he’d have stayed out on the campaign trail he’d have no accountability for anything that happened or didn’t happen,” Lieberman said Friday. “By coming here, he becomes part of it. He thought it was important that he become part of the solution. His presence made a real difference.”
House and Senate Democrats agree that McCain made a difference — just not in the way Lieberman meant.
“God save us from such help,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said Friday. Later in the day, he sniped: “Were back on the progress track now that Sen. McCain is safely in Mississippi."
House and Senate negotiators emerged from a morning meeting Thursday, before McCain arrived, and announced that they’d reached the fundamentals of a deal. Later that afternoon, following a White House meeting called by President Bush and McCain, whatever deal there had been had fallen apart.
There’s no evidence that McCain himself tanked the deal, but there’s also little to suggest that he helped keep it together.
Even one Senate Republican has hinted at unkind thoughts about McCain’s intervention.
"Yesterday, except for the middle part of the day, was a tremendously productive day," said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). Corker singled out the hours from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. as particularly productive — the time when bipartisan, bicameral negotiations were going on — and before McCain entered the Washington picture.
Following their three-hour meeting, congressional negotiators emerged victorious. "I now expect we will, indeed, have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president and bring a sense of certainty to this crisis,” Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican, told the assembled tourists, reporters and a live television audience.
Didn’t happen that way, said Graham and Lieberman.
“This is a myth. This is a political myth and it needs to stop,” said Graham. “Don’t focus on a phony deal and blame John McCain.”
Graham blamed the media for perpetuating the myth of the deal that wasn’t. “I think it was inappropriate for y’all to be telling everybody in the country there’s a deal, when clearly there was no deal,” he said. “Why don’t you go put together this puzzle: Was there ever a deal that fell apart because of John McCain? That’s complete bull. There was never a deal that John McCain broke.”
Graham said that McCain wanted to “make sure there’s a real oversight board… make sure the CEO issue is addressed. To make sure there is a provision for consumers to be able to get a benefit, not just lending institutions. And for heaven’s sake, above all others, is to make sure that the money we get in the future be used to retire the debt, not grow the government.”
Several reporters asked what the difference was between that and the then-current plan.
“What is the current plan?” asked Graham.
“It’s essentially what you laid out,” said a reporter.
“Well, the current plan doesn’t — this is not even close,” Graham said.
The narrative that McCain knocked the negotiations off the rails has been spread by Democrats, said Graham. “He comes back and what’s the first thing Harry Reid says? ‘You’re blowing everything up. What’d you come back for?’ What they tried to do in my opinion is throw something together before John got here.”
Lieberman, too, said that focusing on the deal-not-deal is unfair. “My colleagues who are saying it was a done deal yesterday — there was no done deal,” he said. “There was a tentative agreement among a small number of members, but there was no overall agreement. The caucuses hadn’t even seen it.”
McCain’s purpose, said Lieberman, was to bring about a deal. “He’s trying to help mediate between the House Republicans and everyone else and that’s the way things are done around here and that’s what Sen. McCain has always done. That’s what Sen. McCain has always done in big problems or crises.”
And this is a big one, said Lieberman. “We haven’t faced a problem like this since 9/11. It’s really that big. It’s pretty much different, but that big,” he said. “You’d want the leaders of the two parties here in Washington to reach a solution.”
Lieberman and Graham both said that McCain was working with House Republicans to include some of their concerns, including their primary goal of switching the plan from buying debt to making loans or insuring it.
The House Republican insurance provision, said Lieberman, “is one of the options here and one of the things he’s considered and one of the things he’s asked negotiators to consider.”
Graham, pressed further by reporters to find daylight between McCain’s position and the one being advocated by congressional negotiators and the administration, referred to a provision that would use 20 percent of the profits — if there are any — from the bailout to fund affordable housing, partly through the organization ACORN.
“Twenty percent of the money that should go to retire debt that will be created to solve this problem winds up in a housing organization called ACORN that is an absolute ill-run enterprise, and I can’t believe we would take money away from debt retirement to put it in a housing program that doesn’t work,” said Graham.
Frank, when told that ACORN was a primary reason for McCain’s opposition, dismissed it as unserious, especially considering the slim chance of profits. “At the meeting this morning, Sens. Gregg, Corker and Bennett said they had no objection to that,” said Frank. “It’s an effort, I would suspect, on the part of the McCain campaign to make sure there isn’t an agreement reached without them.”
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Republicans defend McCain's role
By RYAN GRIM | 9/26/08 5:28 PM EDT
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