Answer: Heckuva Job, Johnnie!

Question: What did McBush say to himself this morning?

Shades of Mission Accomplished:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition – hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked.

The rush to claim he had engineered a victory now looks like a strategic blunder that will prolong the McCain’s campaign’s difficulty in finding a winning message on the economy.

Shortly before the vote, McCain had bragged about his involvement and mocked Sen. Barack Obama for staying on the sidelines.

“I’ve never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I’m not going to stop now,” McCain told a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “Sen. Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn’t want to get involved. Then he was monitoring the situation.”

McCain, grinning, flashed a sarcastic thumbs up.

“That’s not leadership. That’s watching from the sidelines,” he added to cheers and applause.

Leadership is taking credit for the non-achievements of others who actually worked hard at a problem and had a shot at solving it until Johnny McBigmouth flashed back into town and injected politics into bipartisan negotiations.

McCain is such a fucking Maverick he claims credit not only for things he had little or nothing to do with, but also for things that never happened.

More on McMaverick’s awesome leadershippery: Not a single member of Arizona’s House Congressional delegation voted in favor of the bailout bill McCain claimed to champion.

More Awesome McCain Leadershippery! After taking credit for engineering the compromise that failed primarily because House Republicans — and every member of McCain’s own delegation — voted against the bailout bill, McCain shows leadership by having his campaign blame the other guy!

Nothing says “leadership like “The Buck Stops Over There!”