Barack Obama: Writer’s Cramp and the Mortgage Mess

The WSJ takes Obama to task on his complete ineptitude and lack of leadership:

If Sen. Obama were truly looking for a kind of deregulation that might be responsible for the current financial crisis, he need only look back to 1998, when the Clinton administration ruled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could satisfy their affordable housing obligations by purchasing subprime mortgages. This ultimately made it possible for Fannie and Freddie to add a trillion dollars in junk loans to their balance sheets. This led to their own collapse, and to the development of a market in these mortgages that is the source of the financial crisis we are wrestling with today.

Finally, on the matter of deregulation and the financial crisis, Sen. Obama should consider his own complicity in the failure of Congress to adopt legislation that might have prevented the subprime meltdown.

In the summer of 2005, a bill emerged from the Senate Banking Committee that considerably tightened regulations on Fannie and Freddie, including controls over their capital and their ability to hold portfolios of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. All the Republicans voted for the bill in committee; all the Democrats voted against it. To get the bill to a vote in the Senate, a few Democratic votes were necessary to limit debate. This was a time for the leadership Sen. Obama says he can offer, but neither he nor any other Democrat stepped forward.

Instead, by his own account, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary, allegedly putting himself on record that subprime loans were dangerous and had to be dealt with. This is revealing; if true, it indicates Sen. Obama knew there was a problem with subprime lending — but was unwilling to confront his own party by pressing for legislation to control it. As a demonstration of character and leadership capacity, it bears a strong resemblance to something else in Sen. Obama’s past: voting present.

If the Senator from Illinois really did forsee the current subprime disaster and the devastating effect it would have on our financial system, he did absolutely nothing about it.  We know that John McCain co-sponsored the Chuck Hagel bill to propose and enforce tighter regulations of the GSE’s, as noted by Hot Air:

It demonstrates a key difference between Obama and John McCain.  When McCain saw the potential for crisis, he took action by co-sponsoring Chuck Hagel’s Fannie/Freddie reform bill that would have increased regulation on the two GSEs.  He spoke in the Senate for its passage.

What did Barack Obama do?  He wrote a letter.  He didn’t bother to co-sponsor the bill that could have prevented this year’s financial collapse, or to even allow it to come to a vote.  Obama talked (allegedly — we have yet to see this letter) while McCain took action.

Despite his tenure as the junior US Senator from Illinois, no legislation was proposed, no hearings called. Just a bad case of writer’s cramp:

The first debate:

Last year, I wrote to the secretary of the Treasury to make sure that he understood the magnitude of this problem and to call on him to bring all the stakeholders together to try to deal with it.

The second debate:

I wrote to Secretary Paulson, I wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, and told them this is something we have to deal with, and nobody did anything about it.

This is what liberals consider “leadership”.  Pathetic…