phxated_wymanYou’ll remember the day in 2008 the financial system collapsed and John McCain suspended his presidential campaign and ran back to DC to take charge.

As PHXated has noted previously, then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s account of the day showed that McCain’s effect on the meetings was essentially that of a large pile of potato sacks.

Now a new book on the first year of the Obama administration by Jonathan Alter tells a similar tale. Here’s an account of it in today’s New York Times:

mccain_green> Barack Obama demonstrated his economic prowess at an extraordinary White House meeting several weeks before he was even elected president. As Jonathan Alter tells it in “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” (Simon & Schuster), this breakout performance occurred at a Sept. 25, 2008, confab requested by the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain.

The meeting was a calculated gambit by Mr. McCain to prove his leadership abilities after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But the book says that when Mr. Obama asked, “What do you think, John?” Mr. McCain feebly joked his way out of an answer, saying, “I’ll just listen.”

Later, Mr. Alter says, Mr. McCain acknowledged that he had not yet read a three-page outline of the controversial $700 billion bailout plan by Henry M. Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary.

President George W. Bush was “poorly informed and detached,” the book says. But Mr. Obama, who had read Mr. Paulson’s plan and copious amounts of related material, stepped into the breach. He gave a cogent overview of the crisis and declared that the Democrats were close to agreement with Mr. Paulson on a deal to approve the bailout.

When he was done, Mr. Alter reports, “a Republican sitting some distance down the long table whispered to a pair of Democratic senators, ‘Everyone here is ready to vote for Obama, including the Republicans.’ ”

See also PHXated’s “The case against John McCain.”