to approve TARP. Josh Bolten, the president’s chief of staff, kept looking down at his phone. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, was calling repeatedly.
When the rehearsal ended, an aide burst into the theater and announced that Senator McCain was trying to reach the president. Bolten and Bush exchanged glances and retreated to their respective quarters to return the calls, reconvening in the Oval Office a short while later. They had both been told the same thing: McCain was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to focus on the financial crisis. He wanted a summit with Bush, Obama, and the congressional leadership at the White House.
The president frowned. “We don’t have to say yes to this,” Bush asked Bolten. “Do we?”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, BOEHNER AND THE HOUSE GOP LEADERSHIP huddled in his suite on the second floor of the Capitol. It had been a miserable seventy-two hours. Uncertainty gripped all of Washington, but nobody felt more heat than Boehner. While the rescue package had critics in both parties and both chambers, the emerging silhouette of a deal was expected to ultimately have sufficient support among Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans, and House Democrats. All bets were off, however, when it came to House Republicans.
Many of them flatly rejected the concept of a bailout, arguing that free markets must be allowed to fail and self-correct. Even those who were open to Paulson’s plan disliked what few specifics they had been given.
The wild card was the party’s presidential nominee. Those Republicans opposed to the bailout hoped that McCain was returning to DC to smash it with a populist hammer, while those Republicans inclined to support it hoped McCain was coming to give them cover.
Suddenly, there he was, the maverick himself, parachuting into Boehner’s suite unannounced and flopping down on the couch. The Republicans around the room exhaled in unison. The big White House summit was hours away, and nobody knew what McCain had up his sleeve.
“So, Boehner,” the Republican nominee said, leaning forward. “What’s the plan?”
Boehner’s face turned a special shade of crimson. “What the hell do you mean, what’s the plan?” he said, coughing cigarette smoke. “You’re running for president. You suspended your campaign. You called the meeting. You tell us!”
McCain’s return to Washington was a politically tactical move, not a legislatively strategic one. He had no plan. Republicans in the room knew it, and soon so would everyone else.
The economy had never been McCain’s area of expertise, nor had he ever mastered the art of projecting empathy to the masses. As the son of a renowned Navy admiral and the husband of a multimillionaire beer heiress, the senator was unfamiliar with financial discomfort. He teased Huckabee during the primary for sounding off on corporate CEOs and global trade deals. He told voters in the Rust Belt, on more than one occasion, that some of their lost jobs were gone for good. He joked that his knowledge of economics boiled down to reading Alan Greenspan’s book. He became flummoxed during an interview when asked how many houses he and his wife owned.14 And just weeks earlier, on the day Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch went down, he had responded, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”15
This was not what voters wanted to hear, particularly those whose livelihoods depended on an industrial vibrancy that was diminishing before their eyes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than two million manufacturing jobs were eliminated between December 2007 and June 2009—15 percent of the entire manufacturing workforce, vanished, in just eighteen months.16
McCain’s staff was unfamiliar with the bailout negotiations, so Boehner tasked one of his lieutenants, Mike Sommers, with accompanying the Republican nominee to the White House meeting. Sommers was supposed to brief McCain en route, but the candidate spent most of the car ride talking by phone with his wife, Cindy, about the first general election debate, scheduled for the following day. When they arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, McCain turned to Sommers as they climbed out of their black SUV: “Okay, what do I need to know?”
Things weren’t going much better in the Oval Office. Bush had arranged for some of the top Republicans—Boehner, McConnell, and Vice President Dick Cheney—to game-plan with Paulson prior to the larger gathering. But the powwow blew up when Bush, a close friend and golfing buddy of Boehner’s, kept needling the House GOP leader about his inability to corral Republican votes. “That son of a bitch pissed me off,” Boehner recalls. “I said, ‘Well, if your treasury