WASHINGTON (AFP) — Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said politics must stay out of delicate talks on a Wall Street bailout and urged his Republican White House rival John McCain to show up for a long-planned debate on Friday.
Speaking after White House talks failed to yield a breakthrough on the rescue deal, Obama said leaders in Congress had appeared to be closing in on agreement earlier Thursday before McCain arrived on Capitol Hill after suspending his presidential campaigning.
Senior Democratic and Republican senators announced Thursday morning that they had agreed on the main principals for a plan under which the government would buy hundreds of billions of dollars in bad debts from shaky financial firms in order to avert a widespread economic crisis.
But by the time a broader group of congressional leaders met for a hastily called summit meeting at the White House with President George W. Bush, McCain and Obama, a group of conservative Republican representatives had come up with a new package of proposals which threw the negotiations into confusion.
"Something happened in the intervening hours," said Obama.
"One of the concerns that I have had over the last several days is that when you start to inject presidential politics into delicate negotiations, then you can actually create more problems rather than less," he said.
"It is amazing how much you can get done when the cameras are not on and nobody is looking to get credit or allocate blame."
Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, who was leading negotiations on the bailout, accused McCain of unhelpful grandstanding by rushing to Washington and intervening in the talks in an effort to reverse his steady fall in opinion polls as voters blamed the Republican administration for the Wall Street crisis.
"What threw us off, is all of a sudden there was some new core agreement floating around which no one had heard of before until we got to the White House," said Dodd.
"What this looked like to me was a rescue plan for John McCain," he said.
As part of his political gambit, McCain also said he wanted to postpone the first presidential debate scheduled for Friday in Mississippi. The Democrat had rebuffed the call and said Thursday he still hoped McCain would appear.
McCain's spokeswoman said after Thursday's White House meeting that the Republican still had no plans to travel to Mississippi for the much-awaited debate.
Obama called on his rival to stick to the original election timetable.
"More important is that McCain and I do go to Mississippi and go before the American people and explain our vision of the economy," he said.
"One of us is going to be in charge of this mess in four months. Senator McCain has no reason to be fearful about this debate," said Obama, who like McCain was staying in Washington Thursday night.
Obama said there would "eventually" be an agreement on the government's request to Congress for a 700-billion-dollar bailout package.
But he again lashed out at Wall Street financial institutions for their "reckless behavior," and accused regulators of "being asleep at the switch."
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