If You Want Change, You Have to Vote for It

John McCain is now a proven failure as leader of his own party.

On Sunday, on NBC's Meet the Press, John McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt prematurely crowed:

"What Senator McCain was able to do was to help bring all of the parties to the table, including the House Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass this."

Of course, that's NOT what happened.

What happened was that House Republicans retreated from John McCain's "leadership."

They wanted nothing to do with it.

And the numbers prove it.

Though this bailout package had a Republican President and a Republican Secretary of the Treasury pushing the deal, only 32.66 percent of GOP Congressmen voted for the bailout, as opposed to 59.57 percent of Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

John McCain could not deliver the votes, and neither could Rep. John Boehner or George W. Bush. John McCain, in facct could not even deliver a single Arizona Republican!

Nancy Pelosi made the calls and, as a consequence she got her Party in order.

But the GOP remains leaderless and ruddlerless and without a moral force.

It is adrift, shrouds rattling, cannonballs careening on deck, with an ancient gimlet-eyed Ahab in the wheel house changing direction every 20 minutes.
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After the vote, the Dow Jones dropped 777-points as the GOP killed the bailout deal -- in effect erasing (in one day!) all the stock market gains of the last eight years.

The 777-point plunge surpassed the 721-point decline set the day after the stock market opened following the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

That said, the plunge was not that huge: about 7 percent. I was around 20 years ago when the market plunged 22 percent in a single day. Seven percent is just a wake-up call compared to that.

Even before the 777-point stock market drop, the public were warming up to the bailout deal according to Rasmussen polling, which found that 33% of of Likely Voters now favor the plan, while 32% are opposed and 35% are not sure. On Friday, just 24% of voters had supported the plan while 50% were opposed.

So where to now? Probably the worst possible situation for John McCain and fellow GOP Members of Congress: having to peform a "reverse public extraction" from the "head up ass" position while demonstrating total lack of leadership and complete fecklessness in the face of fickle public opinion.

Even if they stick the landing, they're gonna break some bones!

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