Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Monday, October 06, 2008 5:11:03 PM
Editor's note: We're on a road trip, from Colorado to the mid-west, taking the sights and sounds of the nation's heartland, as well as guaging it's political temperature. Tarrying now in a quiet hamlet in south-western Minnesota, we perused an article in the Twin Cities' oracle of liberal wisdom, the Star Tribune, which has an uncanny ability to meld its reporting with its editorial proclivities.
A front-page article in Sunday's paper quotes it's own poll, which are notoriously biased and therefore quaranteened from the likes of Gallup and Rasmussen, that concluded that Obama is 18 points ahead of McCain. Citing voters' belief that Obama is better able to deal with our economic crisis and his performance in the first presidential debate, the article makes the predictable conclusion that he is well positioned to win in November.
That prompted our letter to the editor of the Star Trib:
For many, it's a comforting, if unfounded axiom of politics in Minnesota that Democrats generally and Obama specifically, are better able to resolve our economic problems ("Obama leaps ahead of McCain," Oct. 5). Indeed, the conventional wisdom wending it way through the mainstream media is that the Republican anti-regulatory instinct is responsible for the debacle in our capital markets.
For an antidote, we turn to Senate bill 190, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, would have mandated unprecedented levels of regulatory oversight for the mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and would have become law except for the fact that senate Democrats voted against it, on a party-line vote in committee; in contrast, Senator McCain was one of three co-sponsors for the bill. Another carefully guarded secret is that Sens. Obama, Clinton, and Dodd led the charge to run interference in support of Mae and Mac. Not surprising, all three have received tens of thousands of dollars from these mortgage cash machines.
Among other things, the bill would have significantly limited the financial exposure of these entities by redefining the levels of acceptable risk and recalibrating their debt-equity ratio requirements. However, senate Democrats, whose intransigence directly contributed to the debacle we're facing, voted their financial and political conscience, not their ethical conscience, effectively socializing the risk while privatizing the profits.
The media's shameful portrayal of these failures as attributable to Republicans is hardly surprising because they and their Democrat chums in Congress are deft historical revisionists practiced at the art of political opportunism. So, as the Democrats become incandescent, gloating that Republican greed is to blame for our financial sector woes, we would do well to remind them that political self-interest is a bipartisan disease, and that Obama's plan to tax his way out of our crisis is hardly change we can believe in.