Posted by
Always To The Right on Monday, October 06, 2008 5:16:20 PM
We asked John McCain to take off the gloves — and he listened. In
remarks McCain will deliver today, he blasts Democrats, including
Barack Obama, for their market manipulations and defense of Fannie Mae
against regulator warnings. He accuses all of them of encouraging
corruption (emphases mine):
Our current economic crisis is a good case in point.
What was his actual record in the years before the great economic
crisis of our lifetimes?
This crisis started in our housing market in the form of subprime
loans that were pushed on people who could not afford them. Bad
mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was
only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to
spread. This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress, and abetted by Senator Obama.
Senator Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed.
But the truth is I was the one who called at the time for tighter
restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped
prevent this crisis from happening in the first place.
Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac, and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein
them in. As recently as September of last year he said that subprime loans had been, quote, “a good idea.” Well, Senator Obama, that “good idea” has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
To hear him talk now, you’d think he’d always opposed the dangerous
practices at these institutions. But there is absolutely nothing in his
record to suggest he did. He was surely familiar with the people who
were creating this problem. The executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac have advised him, and he has taken their money for his campaign. He
has received more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other
senator in history, with the exception of the chairman of the committee
overseeing them.
Did he ever talk to the executives at Fannie and Freddie about these
reckless loans? Did he ever discuss with them the stronger oversight I
proposed? If Senator Obama is such a champion of financial regulation,
why didn’t he support these regulations that could have prevented this
crisis in the first place? He won’t tell you, but you deserve an answer.
This is exactly what McCain must do to correct the record on this
fiasco. Not only has Obama misrepresented this as a crisis of
deregulation, but the record shows that Democrats like Barney Frank,
Chris Dodd, Gregory Meeks, Lacy Gray, and others opposed the regulators
we already had when they tried to blow the whistle. As late as this
summer, Democrats kept trying to tell the American voters that Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac were stable, when in fact they were collapsing.