As bailout bombs, camps' rhetoric turns combative

Obama urges calm, McCain lashes out

''Things are never smooth in Congress,'' Barack Obama told the crowd at Mountain Range High School in Westminster, Colo. (Emmanuel Dunand/ AFP/ Getty Images)

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama and John McCain were inclined to vote for the Wall Street bailout bill. Both had assumed it would pass and tried to claim credit for helping make it happen and make the bill better for taxpayers.

But when the bill crashed yesterday - and the stock market followed suit - their presidential campaigns reacted in strikingly different ways.

Obama urged voters and the markets to "stay calm," saying congressional disputes were a normal part of the process and that he was "confident" lawmakers would agree on a deal. "Things are never smooth in Congress," he told 3,000 people at Mountain Range High School in Westminster, Colo. "Understand that it will get done, that we are going to make sure that an emergency package is put together, because it is required for us to stabilize the market."

McCain's campaign lashed out at Obama, with a top policy adviser saying the Illinois Democrat "failed to lead" and "phoned it in." "This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country," Douglas Holtz-Eakin said in a statement.

That prompted a strong condemnation from Obama's campaign, which scolded McCain for issuing an "angry and hyper-partisan statement" and declared it "time for Democrats and Republicans to join together and act in a way that prevents an economic catastrophe."

Not long after, in a brief appearance in Iowa, McCain modulated his tone. Though he again blamed Obama for injecting partisanship into the debate, he also called for bipartisan cooperation to rescue the rescue package.

It was unclear exactly how the candidates would participate in crafting and helping to pass a new bailout package. What was certain is that the financial crisis will continue to dominate the national political agenda.

That means both Obama and McCain, as the de facto leaders of their respective parties, will have to at least talk in a more detailed way about the solution, said David Winston, a Republican strategist and a top pollster for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

"It's not enough, given this particular situation in front of them, for John McCain to say he's the experienced candidate or for Barack Obama to say, 'I'm going to offer change from George Bush,' " he said. "For both of them, it's a little bit of . . . show me the money."

McCain has the most obvious decision to make. Last week, in a risky move that caught the Obama campaign by surprise, he briefly suspended his campaign to join the negotiations on the bailout bill in Washington. He even went so far as to suggest that the first debate with Obama should be postponed, but eventually showed up Friday night.

Now, with the stakes even higher and some blame for last week's impasse placed at his doorstep, McCain must determine whether he will suspend his campaign again, weighing the political benefits of being consistent and trying to exhibit leadership against the potential pitfalls of adding to the partisan rancor and linking himself to possible failure.

Obama, who followed McCain reluctantly to Washington last week, seems content to stay away from the negotiations, even as he continues to seek political advantage by focusing on the economy on the stump. Yesterday, in his Colorado speech, he attributed the financial crisis to the Bush administration's - and McCain's - preference for deregulation.

"We can't afford to gamble on four more years of the same disastrous economic policies we've had for the last eight," he said.

Scott Helman of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.