John McCain is facing a competitive Republican primary for his U.S. Senate seat. He’s facing wingnut former Rep. J.D. Hayworth and even wingnuttier Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Some of McCain’s previous votes are getting him in trouble so he’s trying to Castle. His latest move is to pretend he didn’t really vote for bank bailouts.
McCain sat down recently with the Arizona Republic editorial board. Reports the paper:
[T]he four-term senator says he was misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. McCain said the pair assured him that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would focus on what was seen as the cause of the financial crisis, the housing meltdown.
“Obviously, that didn’t happen,” McCain said … “They decided to stabilize the Wall Street institutions, bail out (insurance giant) AIG, bail out Chrysler, bail out General Motors … What they figured was that if they stabilized Wall Street — I guess it was trickle-down economics — that therefore Main Street would be fine.”
We all remember that McCain “froze” his campaign to go to Washington to deal with this crisis. Of course, McCain’s attempt to rewrite history is running up against actual history.
Here’s how McCain explained the bailout plan in a September 22, 2008 interview: “‘We’re going to take over these bad loans. And we’re going to have the taxpayer help you out. But when the time comes and the economy recovers, then anything that’s gained back is going to go to the taxpayers first.” As the Chicago Sun-Times explained in reporting McCain’s comments: “The plan would dole out huge sums of money to financial firms to purchase bad mortgage-backed securities so the firms can resume normal lending operations.”
In a speech the following day about improvements he was seeking to what became the TARP legislation, McCain made clear that he knew the measure was targeted at Wall Street, declaring: “No Wall Street executives should profit from taxpayer dollars … The senior leaders of any firm that is bailed out should not be making more than the highest paid government official.”
Has there ever been a bigger fiction story than McCain the independent maverick?