Bush’s bailout speech on Sept. 24 was eerily similar to his speech on invading Iraq in 2003

After a disastrous week leading up to the debate last Friday, and now that polls reflect what was plainly obvious that night — that Barack Obama won the debate against John McCain — it is time to officially declare that the wheels have come off the McCain campaign. Here’s a tick-tock of the slow-mo train wreck:

Saturday, Sept. 21

• The New York Times reports that McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, was a highly paid lobbyist for the failed mortgage company Freddie Mac.

Sunday, Sept. 22

• McCain denies to the New York Times and CNBC that Rick Davis lobbied for Freddie Mac, saying Davis “has had nothing to do with it since [2005], and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

Monday, Sept. 23

• Newsweek confirms that Rick Davis had been paid at least $345,000 by Freddie Mac.
• McCain campaign manager Rick Davis denies taking money from Freddie Mac: “I never lobbied a single day.”
• The Advocate reports that Mark Buse McCain’s chief of staff is gay — a fact that might upset the homophobic base of the Republican Party. On a serious note, Buse was also a lobbyist for Freddie Mac.

Wednesday, Sept. 24

• In a move that reads an awful lot like panic, McCain takes a break from politicking in New York to announce he is suspending his campaign to go to Washington to solve the budget crisis — this despite the fact that he has not shown up for a vote in the Senate since April 8. Later in the evening McCain operatives add two new elements into the mix. The first is that McCain won’t debate Obama on Friday unless there is a budget deal. The second is that, since in all likelihood there won’t be a deal, nor therefore, a debate, Palin’s debate with Joe Biden on Thursday, Oct. 2, will have to be delayed indefinitely. McCain’s critics accuse him of using the Wall Street crisis as a cover for canceling Palin’s debate.
• In one of only two interviews given to legitimate journalists, Sarah Palin apparently could not pronounce the word “caricature” when she tried to describe the derision she received after she suggesting that governing a state that borders Russia gives her credibility in foreign policy.
• McCain phones David Letterman to cancel his appearance on Letterman’s CBS show that night. But Letterman is soon apprised that McCain was lying, that he has not rushed back to Washington but is in another CBS studio taping an interview with Katie Couric. Letterman lambastes McCain for the next three nights.
• George Bush gives a dreadful speech in which he trots out the same script, almost word for word, for the speech he used to scare Americans into supporting his bogus invasion of Iraq. (See video above.) Fortunately for McCain, hardly anyone watched Bush’s speech, and most of those who did probably didn’t believe a word he said. As one GOP operative put it, “I have never heard a president give a less reassuring speech.”

Thursday, Sept. 25

• The National Enquirer’s cover story claims that three witnesses say Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband Todd’s business partner in 1996.
• A video circulates of Palin being blessed by a Kenyan witch hunter.
• McCain, still in New York, says, “I’m an old Navy pilot and I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck … I cannot carry on a campaign as though this dangerous situation had not occurred, or as though a solution were at hand, which it clearly is not.”
• McCain admits he has not read the proposal for the Wall Street bailout from Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, even though the document is only three pages long.
• In Washington at last, McCain attends a meeting at the White House with Bush, Obama and congressional leaders. There was a deal in place before the meeting started but “McCain sat quiet through most of the meeting, never offered specifics, and spoke only at the end to raise doubts about the rough compromise that the White House and congressional leaders were nearing.” Senate Finance Chair Christopher Dodd said, “What this looked like to me was a rescue plan for John McCain for two hours and took us away from the work we are trying to do today. Serious people trying to do serious work to come up with an answer.”

Friday, Sept. 26

• The corporate media goes nuts when Kathleen Parker, a lesser-known contributor to the Buckleyite National Review Online, urges Palin to resign from the GOP ticket.
• Numerous sources report that McCain lied about suspending his campaign, which has in fact continued in full force, with campaign offices open and ads running across the country.
• With no deal in sight, McCain “blinks” and announces he will attend the debate after all, thus ending one of the most shockingly bad political moves in the current cycle. Just as lawyers in court don’t ask questions for which they don’t know the answer, political operatives don’t parachute their candidates in to solve crises unless they know for damn sure the crisis is already solved.
• Even before the announcement, however, his campaign accidentally posts an ad saying McCain won the debate.
• On the flight from Memphis, a pool reporter describes the atmosphere on the plane as “utter confusion.”
• During the debate, McCain blinks, grins and smirks but avoids directly facing Obama. He quotes Ronald Reagan four times, despite the fact that Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who were good friends of McCain’s first wife, reportedly disliked McCain intensely because of the cavalier way he dumped her after she was disfigured in an automobile accident.

Today: Monday, Sept. 29

I had intended to close out with speculation that we could expect more of the same from the McCain campaign this week, but then came word that today McCain may have made his biggest gaffe yet. As news broke that the House GOP killed the bailout bill in a fit of pique over partisan remarks by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we also learned that McCain had already taken credit for the bill’s passage, according to right-leaning Politico.com:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition – hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked.

The rush to claim he had engineered a victory now looks like a strategic blunder that will prolong the McCain’s campaign’s difficulty in finding a winning message on the economy.

Shortly before the vote, McCain had bragged about his involvement and mocked Sen. Barack Obama for staying on the sidelines.

“I’ve never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I’m not going to stop now,” McCain told a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “Senator Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn’t want to get involved. Then he was monitoring the situation.”
McCain, grinning, flashed a sarcastic thumbs-up.

“That’s not leadership. That’s watching from the sidelines,” he added to cheers and applause.

Uh, excuse me, Senator, but your wheels are on fire.