Donaldson on McCain: ABC 10/15/08

George Stephanopoulos, George Will, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts and Donna Brazile on John McCain
"This Week" 10:39am
Panel

TRANSCRIPTION
SAM DONALDSON: [E]veryone's now for re-regulation. You know, we deregulated the savings and loan industry [...] in '79, I realize, but Reagan really accelerated it and then we had to clean that up. We de-regulated, in '99 and 2000, the banking industry; Phil Gramm and others. I think that Obama ad is correct. [Gramm] was one of the prime movers. Now we're gonna have to clean that up at great expense. So I think, for John McCain, though, who has the heaviest burden here since he voted for all the deregulation, for him to now say he would be the toughest re-regulator is kind of a hard thing to swallow.

COKIE ROBERTS: [H]e's a republican and whenever republicans get into this kind of mess, everybody--even people who were not born or close to being born--the specter of Herbert Hoover comes out to haunt them.

GEORGE WILL: I suppose the McCain campaign's hope is that, when there's a big crisis, people will go for age and experience. The question is who, in this crisis, looked more presidential? Calm and unflustered. It wasn't John McCain who, as usual, substituting vehemence for coherence said, 'Let's fire somebody,' and he picked one of the most experienced and conservative people in the administration, Chris Cox and, for no apparent reason, or, at least, none that he vouched safe, he said, 'Fire Chris Cox at the SEC.' It was unpresidential behavior by a presidential aspirant.

DONALDSON: It was two days after he said that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. I mean, his talking points have gotten all mixed up and I think the question of age is back on the table.

[...]

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: That moment, on Monday, Donna where John McCain said, 'The fundamentals of the economy are strong,' he said it 16 times before [...] and the McCain team was reeling for the rest of the day [...].

DONNA BRAZILE: [J]ohn McCain is just unsure of his voice on the economy. He outsourced it so long to others that now he must talk to the American people in a coherent fashion. He doesn't get it [...].

GEORGE WILL: McCain has found his inner-voice. It is his inner William Jennings Bryant. He's a populist now. The problem is, if you're running as a man who is, above all else, a leader, populism is always pandering and pandering is always the reverse of leadership.

[...]

DONALDSON: When I say age, I don't know. The difference between finding your talking point and not delivering the right one--we've seen him do this frequently, but this last week was the worst. Between two stops in Flordia [...] he had to revise his thinking about what he wanted to say about the economy. He wanted to feel the pain suddenly rather than say everything's really all right.

SD2 JM ABC 09-21-08 10.39 (JR#557)

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• McCain
• Hoover
• economy
• tracking