You know that mortgage plan that McCain "unveiled" in last night's debate? The one his staff members weren't prepared to talk about? This might help explain all the surprise:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made an overnight change in the homeowner bailout he proposed at Tuesday's presidential debate, making it more generous to financial institutions and more costly for taxpayers.
McCain's staff says it was always meant that way.When McCain sprung his surprise idea at the start of the debate in Nashville, his campaign posted details online of his American Homeownership Resurgence Plan, which would direct the government to buy up bad home mortgages, allowing strapped people to keep their property.
The document posted and e-mailed by the McCain campaign on Tuesday night says at the end of its first full paragraph: "Lenders in these cases must recognize the loss that they've already suffered."
So the government would buy the mortgages at a discounted rate, reflecting the declining value of the mortgage paper.
But when McCain reissued the document on Wednesday, that sentence was missing, to the dismay of many conservatives.
That would mean the U.S. would pay face value for the troubled documents, which was the main reason Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) gave for opposing the plan.
A McCain campaign official explained the change: "That language was mistakenly included in the initial draft and it's been corrected. It doesn't reflect the intentions of the initiative, which necessitated the correction and the removal of the sentence. A simple mistake."
It's not just that his people don't know what they are doing. It's that McCain has no clue how to run in a competitive race. And worse, he has no idea that he's so clueless.
Look. It's not like this was a minor omission. That sentence changes the entire meaning of the proposal. You don't accidentally include it any more than you accidentally forget it. Not in the final month of a presidential campaign. I mean, c'mon...
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