McCain being McCain: new gambit or another payoff?

By Jeff Mason - Analysis

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - It could be the move that secures or destroys his White House hopes.

John McCain's decision last week to suspend his campaign and return to Washington to help broker a Wall Street bailout deal drew scorn from Democrats and praise from some Republicans, who saw a chance for the Arizona senator to show his "maverick" style and ability to work with both parties.

The results did not turn out exactly as planned.

The Republican presidential candidate became an immediate target for the opposing party, which blamed him for torpedoing a bill, and a bipartisan meeting with President George W. Bush and rival Barack Obama ended in chaos.

So McCain retreated. He flew to Mississippi to debate Obama after first threatening to skip the event and then came back to Washington to work the phones and maneuver behind the scenes.

By Monday a deal was in place and McCain, after nearly a week without public campaign events, returned to the campaign trail with a trip to Ohio.

Was it worth it?

"In the short run it has not helped him," said Andrew Busch, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California.

"In fact, if you look at all of the daily tracking polls, he's lost a considerable amount of ground just over the last few days," he said.

Time to make up that decline is getting short. With just over a month to go before the November 4 election, McCain may not have many more dramatic moves left in his arsenal.

But aides played down the political ramifications and, even as the senator carefully deflected credit, said his intervention made a difference in forming a plan that fellow Republicans -- especially in the House of Representatives -- could accept.

"There is a point sometimes when a process is broken that presence matters, and McCain brought presence to this that was important," said senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

"You literally cannot phone that in, and he didn't."

In some ways he did, making some 17 phone calls on Saturday alone, according to an adviser, while trying to stay out of the limelight that caused havoc upon his initial return.

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