Later On

He’s losing track of everything. From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Facing a primary challenge from former Congressman J.D. Hayworth, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been “moving starkly — and often awkwardly — to the right,” even reversing his 2008 campaign positions like support for cap-and-trade. In an interview in which he tried to distance himself from the bank bailout he supported in the fall of 2008, McCain told the Arizona Republic last week that his abrupt move to suspend his campaign during the financial crisis in September 2008 came at President Bush’s request. The paper reported that “McCain said Bush called him in off the campaign trail, saying worldwide economic catastrophe was imminent and that he needed his help.” McCain’s new account doesn’t match up, however, with several descriptions of the decision. In their book Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann report that the decision was in fact McCain’s: “[H]e called Bush and informed him of his decision, and asked if the president would host a meeting at the White House for him, Obama, and congressional leaders to discuss the bailout bill.” In his memoir, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also made clear that McCain called the meeting. “This was supposed to be McCain’s meeting,” wrote Paulson. “He’d called it, not the president, who simply accommodated the Republican candidates wishes. Now it looked as if McCain had no plan at all — his idea had been to suspend his campaign and summon us all to this meeting. It was not a strategy, it was a political gambit.”