The old adage, "Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan" reveals only half the truth. The fall out from the bailout defeat the other day is proving that, orphan or not, defeat can produce a hundred paternity suits, put forth by individuals trying to distance themselves from the unwanted delivery sitting on their doorstep.
Amongst the more ridiculous claims, Peter Baker in the New York Times blames marketing. "The politics of governance is as much about marketing as anything else," he says. If it hadn't been called a bailout, it would have been fine. Nonsense: the bailout was called a bailout because that's what it was - socialising the debt, privatising the profit. People are not as dumb as you marketeers think. Call it a world-saving-super-duper-everyone-wins package, and it still would have been defeated.
In a particularly egregious stunt, it seems McCain and his Republican allies are blaming Obama. Apparently his refusal to follow McCain's lead by injecting partisan politics into the bailout debate was a flagrant example of injecting partisan politics into the bailout debate. Nice.
More plausibly, Yglesias blames Paulson for not devising and presenting an appropriate plan in the first place. "The smart thing to do," he says, "would have been to privately alert key congressional leaders that he thought the ad hoc approach wasn’t sustainable and they and their staffs should expect to spend the weekend in sequestered talks with him and Ben Bernanke to work something out." And just to make sure no-one is feeling left out, Clive Crook blames everyone.
The whole game is a nonsense, as shown most of all by House Republicans' attempts to say that Nancy Pelosi's fiery speech was the reason the bill fell down. After all, what does this say about their own petty-mindedness? If cosmetic reasons were responsible for the failure of the bill, the whole affair is a terrible indictment of Washington. Whether Paulson and Bush's terrible negotiating strategy, the poorly designed bill, or the partisan bickering, these factors are truly embarrassing.
The only light at the end of the tunnel comes from that part of the failure which can be attributed to sincere policy disagreement, not mistakes: the hostility of the American people to a bad deal, and the fact that the impending elections left Congresspeople democratically accountable for once in their lives.
One lesson is clear, though: more and more, Obama's decision to steer well clear of the whole thing seems to be the sensible course of action. McCain ostentatiously put Obama on the back foot, but in the long run it has tied him to the bill far more closely than it has for his Democrat rival.
Think Of the Children
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