John McCain the anti-lobbyist guy? John McCain the change Washington guy? That’s like saying Mitt Romney the bald guy. That’s like Barack Obama the fat guy.
That quote comes to us from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow during her introduction to an interview with Bob Barr. The Congressman was invited on the show to discuss the response of the McCain – Palin campaign to the Fannie and Freddie bailout, as detailed in their joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Observe the emphasized portions.
Treasury has broadly followed the McCain plan, outlined months ago, and gets at the short-term heart of the problem. That plan reinforces the federal commitment to meet our obligations and get this mess behind us. It replaces management and board members. It requires that shareholders take losses first. It puts taxpayers first in line for any repayments. And it terminates future lobbying, which was one of the primary contributors to this great debacle.
Fannie and Freddie’s lobbyists succeeded and Congress failed. Under our administration this will not happen again.
If your head is spinning right now, fear not. It’s simply a normal reaction for anyone who follows the shifting tides of political news. You see, McCain and Palin are making it very clear that Big Mac saw this problem coming long ago and he tried to warn us about it! In fact, he took these problems so seriously that he hired Rick Davis to be his campaign manager. That’s right… John McCain selected, as the person to manage his campaign for the White House, a man who previously worked as one of the “deep-pocketed lobbyists in Washington” who fought against additional regulation and supervision of the twin mortgage giants, thus serving as one of the “primary contributors to this great debacle.”
I’ve been puzzled for some time as to why Team McCain would try to co-opt the whole “change” theme from the Obama Hope Train, and these types of situations make it all the more confusing. You’ll note from the op-ed above that the other villains in this drama – aside from the lobbyists like Davis – are the members of Congress who have “failed.” Would that be the same Congress that McCain has been serving in for the better part of three decades?
How this type of messaging works (and it clearly is working if you look at the polls) is still a mystery. It reminds us of the McCain team’s recent protestations of how Obama called Sarah Palin “a pig” for using the old saw, “lipstick on a pig.” The amazing part is that they manage to do this with a straight face when McCain said the exact same thing about Hillary Clinton.
While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, he said it was “eerily reminiscent” of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the early 1990s.
“I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” he said of her proposal.
But enough of that and back to the original interview. Barr maintains his normal, real straight talking, no holds barred style (both puns intentional) in skewering both Obama and McCain for not offering real change in how government operates. Watch it yourself and let me know what you think.