And your take is, generally the entire congress failed, but mention specifically that only 2/3 democrats voted for it, and not mentioning the 2/3 of republicans that voted against it.

I didn’t get back to my other comment, but I was complaining bout myself – that other comment I gave was way too dramatic. Anyway, I was trying to highlight the irony here; one would expect the Dems to be struggling to support this administration’s proposal, especially when it comes to bailing out the a flawed economic policy that these ‘fiscal conservatives’ played a large role in implementing.

BTW: for anyone still following this thread, Dems voted 140 yea, 95 nay
Repubs voted 65 yea, 133 nay So Alan had it right, 60% of Dems voted for it and only 33% Repubs. Just the opposite of what you’d expect in a world not turned upside down.

But why were the Republican leadership so out of touch with their members on which way they were to vote? Well now they’re telling us it was because of House Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi’s speech given before the vote today. They were insulted b/c she gave a partisan speech. Deputy Whip Eric Cantor said: “Speaker Pelosi’s speech that, frankly struck the tone of partisanship that was innapropriate in this discussion.” And that is the reason he gave for failing to reach the numbers needed to pass the bill to save America from financial disaster. It just keeps gettin better & better,

The fact that only 60% of House Democrats voted for today’s bill is embarrassing for party leaders, Obama included.

Alan,

If we had a Democratic administration in the White House, I’d agree with that statement.

But seriously, let’s all admit what the elephant in the room is here …

With the election in just a few weeks, Nobody whether they have a D or an R after their name wants to see ads run against them, telling voters that they sided with the Bush administration.

In that context, I actually find it pretty amazing that the Dems were able to round up 60%.

… it’s the Republicans who are running away from their own President.

Leadership is sorely lacking ALL AROUND.

I responded to you on the other post as well, but I’ll take a stab here too. I can’t characterize it as the Republicans “killing” the bill when the Dems only got 60% of their people to vote for it. That’s pretty poor. And, really, my issue isn’t that they failed to pass THIS bill, it’s that we keep hearing a bill is about to pass and then everything falls through. That’s poor managment all around and its giving the market jitters. If they’d just said it will be mid-week before we pass a bill, then the market doesn’t sink so far today.

I don’t blame those who voted against the bill for that market drop. I blame those who convinced everyone that they had a bill that could pass today.

OK, let’s take another stab at this. I, once again, agree with a lot you said in this post. I do believe, however, that the President and his finance people did the poor job of communicating the extent of this problem and that the leaders in Congress, Dems & Repubs, deserve much credit for all the hard work- for once. What I don’t hear you saying is that it is clearly the House Repubs that have killed this bill.

I know that a lot if House Dems voted against it, and that many average people don’t want this ‘bailout’ to happen. But the proposal was debated in a bipartisan manner with reps from both sides, from both the House and Senate. A head count was taken before the vote and the Republican leaders thought they had the numbers. The Dems had a majority on their side and probably could’ve passed this bill alone, but they were told that enough Repubs came around in the end to do it in a bipartisan way.

Now it was stated time and again by the Dem leaders that they wanted to do this as a bipartisan majority to present it to the American people in the best way possible, the GOP knew it was close but I’m sure had to give their pre-vote approval to go ahead with it – and they got screwed by the far Right ‘Fiscal Conservatives’ in their party, and so have the rest of us. We know they didn’t want to swallow it, when the House Minority Leader calls it a “crap sandwich” we hate to eat, that’s obvious; talk about not selling it. But they did what they had to do to work it out… almost. It only missed by 10 – 12 votes!

Now, what’s really irksome is that the Repubs now want to blame the Dems for crafting a bad bill – it was the Administrations bad plan that painstakingly was made MUCH BETTER by every one involved – except the ‘fiscal conservatives’. Like Obama kept getting accused of, I just don’t understand….

Also I completely agree. Obama was good at not mouthing off to use this event for political gain (as far as I know), but some involvement would have been nice. McCain said everything and did nothing. Obama said nothing and did nothing. Oh well.