The failed bailout’s fallout

House Republicans led the “revolt of the nihilists” against the $700 billion economic rescue package, said David Brooks in The New York Times, and their short-sighted voting will backfire when the economy tanks. The plan “was nobody’s darling,” but by confusing “talk radio with reality,” and disregarding their leaders and the experts, they seem to be on a “single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party” and its standard-bearer, John McCain.

McCain would be in trouble anyway, said Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic online, because voters blame Republicans for this “enormous, many-tentacled, fundamental economic failure.” McCain didn’t help himself by unsuccessfully intervening in negotiations, but Barack Obama didn't distinguish himself in the crisis, either.

No one in America’s “feckless political class” did enough, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created division with a “highly partisan speech” before the voting, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was a horrible salesman for his plan. And President Bush is a “spent political force.”

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The whole GOP ideal of “cowboy capitalism” is spent, said Howard Fineman in MSNBC online, and it’s only a mild exaggeration to say that “the Obama Administration began at midnight Sunday,” when the bailout package was finalized. Even if Obama loses, “our politics now [have] shifted seismically in his philosophical direction.”