Posturing

Patrick Ruffini argues that McCain is losing the bailout war:

The GOP's best hope of jamming up Obama's messaging on change was not necessarily to stop the bailout, but to seem like the side most hostile to it and to the status quo largely shaped by an an out of control Fannie and Freddie.

Driving the fact that Fannie and Freddie were Democratic patronage mills was crucial from day one (instead we got the Chris Cox distraction, which had nothing to do with anything). Also throwing the President's "ownership society" under the bus -- in which a lot of bad loans were encouraged in the name of showing good minority and low-income homeownership numbers. McCain and the GOP needed to use this to achieve clear separation from Bush and the corrupt Dodd/Rangel Congress, even if it was mostly symbolic on the question of the bailout itself.

Instead what happens? It's Barack Obama who gets to play politics with this while doing nothing to stop the bailout, huffing and puffing about "no blank check" and socializing Wall Street. This is posturing, pure and simple. But it is effective posturing. And no one is accusing Obama, Reid, and Dodd of submaring the bailout despite tacking on their list of demands.