Barack Obama and John McCain just lost to None of the Above – Telegraph Blogs

Thursday 10 July 2014 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Gerald Warner


Barack Obama and John McCain just lost to None of the Above

Amid the chaos and fear on Wall Street and around the world, with banks toppling like ninepins, two further losers beyond Fortis and Hypo have registered on guttering screens: Barack Obama and John McCain have both been rejected by their parties in Congress in favour of None of the Above. Both candidates supported the $700 billion bail-out that has just been battered to death on the floor of Congress by 228 votes to 205.

It is not unprecedented for a president of the United States eventually to lose the confidence of his party in Congress, as has now happened to George W Bush. What is unprecedented is for a presidential candidate to lose control of his party even before he has been elected, as has just happened to both Obama and McCain. Obama backed the bail-out, only to see 94 Democrat representatives tell him where to put it. McCain, more reluctantly, supported the proposal: 132 out of 199 Republicans told him to spin on it.

Representatives chose to listen to their constituents rather than to party managers – a messy, democratic outcome unimaginable in Britain. But the $700 billion question is: where does this leave the two candidates? Do they claim their party rebels are mavericks? In McCain's case that uncomfortably paints him as a conformist. Do they trash Main Street in favour of Wall Street? Obama has already issued a limp-wristed statement claiming that Congress will come round: "I'm confident we're going to get there, but it's going to be rocky."

Will all those principled taxpayers change their stance if the economy goes into meltdown? Or is this a real-life face-down of creeping socialism and the return of American capitalism to its non-negotiable roots? The majority against the deal was so solid, it is hard to believe Nancy Pelosi's infamous speech was responsible for provoking it. Nevertheless, it was a classic of irresponsible partisanship and a dramatic illustration of how poisonous the Democrat soul has become.

Her hysterical attack on "the Bush administration's failed economic policies – policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system" ignored the deadly Clinton regulations denounced in my previous blog, whereby the Federal Reserve compelled banks to accept welfare and unemployment benefit as income sources for mortgages for borrowers who should never have been regarded as eligible. As an across-the-aisle exercise in bi-partisan conciliation, in the style promised by Barack Obama, Pelosi's speech somehow lacked efficacy.

This presidential election has lost its centre of gravity – everything is in free-fall.

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