There are Republicans in Washington who've taken to calling New Hampshire's senior senator "Judd the Great."

Judd Gregg doesn't think much of it. "Yeah, somebody said that," he said of the nickname given him by a spokesman to Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. "I think it's a little over the top."

The soft-spoken Gregg took a lead role in crafting a $700 billion Wall Street rescue package, negotiating late into the night and through last weekend on behalf of Senate Republicans. The deal, with added supervision and provisions for the money to be doled out in three chunks, passed both houses of Congress last week and was signed by President Bush on Friday.

Gregg has been a point man in crafting the deal and making the case for it to the public. He's been on television, radio and in the newspapers, even getting Daily Show comedy treatment. The Hill newspaper ran a headline last week: "In the Senate, Judd the Great rides to rescue." While the stock market has gone haywire, the article said, Gregg's "political stock may be at an all-time high." Republicans, the article said, credit Gregg with salvaging a deal.

Republicans aren't alone in their praise. Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, the Banking Committee chairman and a lead negotiator on the Democratic side, praised Gregg in an interview with the Monitor. "He was invaluable," Dodd said. Gregg, he said, was "an adult in the room who clearly knew we had to do something."

"There just aren't a lot of people around that I can turn to at a moment like this that will sit down and put their ideology aside," Dodd said. "They used to be a lot more frequent."

The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, Gregg is an attorney and tax expert by training and a detail man by nature. In an interview, Gregg cited another experience as key to his work on the bailout: as governor of New Hampshire during the state's massive bank failures and recession in the early 1990s, which he said provided crucial lessons. He said swift FDIC action in reorganizing the banks back then helped the state climb out of recession before other states did.

The lessons he took into this negotiation: "First, I think you have to come at the issue boldly, and you have to come at it aggressively. And I think you have to be flexible, you can't be ideological," he said.

The idea of raising the nation's debt ceiling to clear toxic mortgage-related assets from the nation's ailing financial institutions was radical. The fact that it came just weeks before the November elections added another layer of complication. Democrats complained they simply don't trust the Bush administration, while some Republicans balked at the idea, saying that the plan is a step toward of socialism. Throughout the debate, financial institutions kept faltering, among them Washington Mutual, the biggest bank failure in American history.

Gregg's argument was simple. "To not act is to guarantee that your constituents are going to suffer," he said. "I don't care how ideological you are on the conservative side of the agenda. If you're about to see your friends and neighbors put through massive economic distress, lose their jobs, lose their savings. . . . I don't think any logical person, whether they're conservative or liberal, is going to say that's a good result."

Fast-moving

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson first pitched the idea two weeks ago, but Gregg said he didn't need to hear from Paulson to sell him on the plan. He'd already been hearing - and warning - that the economy was on the brink of disaster. Banks weren't loaning to each other. "It was pretty evident that we were headed into uncharted waters," he said.

"I heard from people that I have great respect for that everything was starting to shut down. The lights were about to be turned off on American commerce."

Amid the negotiations, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said he was suspending his campaign to help get a deal. Gregg and fellow Republicans have said that the presence of McCain and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped focus discussions. Dodd says McCain, an Arizona senator, didn't talk to him at all, but almost derailed the deal they had.

"The only thing John McCain was trying to do was rescue his campaign. . . . I never heard from John. Not a word. Not a word from his staff," Dodd said. Of the deal, Dodd said, "This had a lot more to do with Judd Gregg than it did with John McCain."

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