McCain speaks up for Geithner/McCain refuses to attack Obama’s foreign policy

McCain speaks up for Geithner
By Edward Luce and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: March 20 2009 21:00 | Last updated: March 20 2009 21:00
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6e824394-158d-11de-b9a9-0000779fd2ac.html


Tim Geithner, the embattled US Treasury secretary, should be given a chance to succeed, says John McCain, the former presidential candidate, who is the first prominent Republican to speak up in Mr Geithner’s defence amid growing calls for his resignation.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Mr McCain said that the “perfect storm” over AIG “has been as explosive in a short period of time as anything I have seen”.

Mr McCain, who was one of the few Republican senators to vote in favour of Mr Geithner’s nomination after revelations of tax arrears, was speaking at the end of a week in which the Republican Party has targeted Mr Geithner amid mounting public anger over Wall Street bonuses.

“Everyone acknowledges he needs help,” said Mr McCain, in reference to the Obama administration’s difficulty in recruiting nominees to the Treasury department, where Mr Geithner remains the only official to have been confirmed.

Mr McCain also distanced himself from Republican “righteous indignation” over Mr Obama’s budget tactics. Many of Mr McCain’s colleagues fear Mr Obama will use the congressional “reconciliation” process, which enables the majority to circumvent an opposition filibuster, to smuggle through healthcare reforms and energy cap and trade in the budget.

Mr McCain said that a congressional short-cut could be employed by the administration that had been devised by Republicans and used by George W. Bush to push through tax cuts. “Republicans invented this,” he said. “I don’t like it but there are chickens coming home to roost.”



McCain refuses to attack Obama’s foreign policy
By Edward Luce and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: March 20 2009 21:27 | Last updated: March 20 2009 21:27
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/26d9927e-1595-11de-b9a9-0000779fd2ac.html


It was almost as if last autumn’s bitterly fought presidential election never happened. En route to Brussels, where he will give a keynote speech on Saturday at a security conference, John McCain sounds supportive of the man who defeated him.

Asked whether Barack Obama will return next month empty-handed from Strasbourg, where he will request more support from his Nato counterparts in Afghanistan, Mr McCain said: “There is enormous goodwill in Europe towards the new president.”

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr McCain, who retained his Senate seat when he became his party’s nominee, repeatedly declined to criticise Mr Obama’s foreign policy stances, including the decision to explore the possibilities of talks with Iran. “I’m not against a dialogue with the Iranians,” he said. “What I was opposed to in the campaign was a one-to-one dialogue with characters dedicated to the extermination of Israel [Mahmoud Ahmedi-Nejad, Iran’s president].”

Mr McCain was equally emollient on Mr Obama’s soft-pedalling approach to Russia, in spite of bouts of near cold-war rhetoric during the campaign (“We are all Georgians now”).

This month Hillary Clinton gave Sergei Lavrov, her Russian counterpart, a box that said “reset” in English on one side and “self-destruct”, instead of “reset”, in Russian on the other side in a slip-up that caused some embarrassment.

“If I gave him a reset button, I’d find someone in the state department who understands Russian,” said Mr McCain. But he added: “I’d reiterate that we want to engage in dialogue with Russia . . . We are not going to see a reignition of the cold war. Russia doesn’t have the military or economic clout to do that.”

In less than two weeks Mr Obama will meet Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, and Hu Jintao, China’s president, for separate bilateral meetings on the fringes of the G20 summit in London. Mr McCain said China and Russia were flexing their muscles round the world.

But he suggested that while there were points of friction, neither wanted confrontation with the US. “In both cases, it is clearly in their interests to co-operate in certain areas and there are other manifestations of age-old anger or muscle flexing . . . that we have to handle with sensitivity.”

Speaking as Mr Obama finalises a new Afghanistan policy, the Arizona senator who supports a stronger US troop commitment, said there was a debate within the administration on whether to take a “minimalist” app roach or to launch a more comprehensive counter-insurgency effort.

Mr McCain urged his one-time rival to provide the American people with straight talk on the difficult nature of the conflict. “The president should not wait a day without saying ‘this is going to be tough’. A year from now as we move in to southern Afghanistan, casualties are going to be higher, and the anti-war sentiment will grow.”