10/04/2008
The US presidential candidates were quick to respond to the passage of the 700-billion US dollar bill to bail out the nation's tottering financial industry on Friday.
Speaking to reporters after landing in Flagstaff, Arizona, Republican presidential candidate John McCain took credit for helping push the bailout through Congress by bringing House Republicans to the table.
Last week he briefly rearranged his campaign schedule to go to Washington as lawmakers began considering the package. "This rescue bill isn't perfect, it's an outrage that it is even necessary, but we have to stop the damage to our economy done by corrupt and incompetent practices on Wall Street and in Washington. The action Congress took today is a tourniquet, it is not a permanent solution", McCain said.
Despite Congress' passage of the bailout, there was no indication the Wall Street crisis would give way to other campaign issues. US President George W Bush signed the bill into law on Friday, less than two hours after it was passed.
The final vote was 263-171 in the House of Representatives, a comfortable margin that was 58 more votes than the measure garnered in Monday's stunning defeat when the bill first went to the vote.
Friday's vote capped two weeks of tumult in Congress and on Wall Street, punctuated by daily warnings that the country confronted the gravest economic crisis since the stock market crash of 1929 if lawmakers failed to act. In Pennsylvania, Obama spoke to reporters while shopping for flowers at Penny's Flowers in Glenside.
Like McCain, Obama said the rescue package wasn't a fix. "The fundamentals of the economy aren't sound and we're going to have to do a lot of work moving forward", Obama said. With a grim economic backdrop, Obama is seeking to solidify his lead in national and battleground polls, while McCain looks for a game-changing development to close a gap that grew in part because McCain struggled to respond to the financial crisis and because economic woes tend to push voters toward Democratic candidates.
Polls show Obama has made progress in persuading voters that he's ready to be president and that McCain would continue Bush's economic policies. But the Illinois senator still has work to do to lock down his lead in case outside events or campaign blunders change the campaign conversation.
Obama planned to continue to use the economy and McCain's 90 percent support for Bush in the Senate to hammer his opponent and to argue that the Republican ticket has failed to articulate how it would be different from the Bush administration. Aides still view the race as very close.
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