Oh that President Obama, he is such a card. Why the other day, he was talking to some Democrats at a fundraiser and he got on the subject of financial regulation, and in that faux folksy tone he assumes when striking a partisan and mindlessly populist note, he said.
“Now, the Senate Republican leader (Mitch McConnell), he paid a visit to Wall Street a week or two ago. He took along the chairman of their campaign committee. He met with some movers and shakers up there. I don’t know what he discussed. All I can tell you is when he came back, he promptly announced he would oppose the financial regulatory reform. He would oppose it. Shocking.”
And thus the debate is over, right?
Maybe not, if someone wants to respond in kind. That someone might note press reports that the CEO of Goldman Sachs – under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission – has visited the White House four times and with Obama’s top economic advisor twice, that the company has hired a former White House lawyer and that, in his presidential campaign, Obama received close to $1 million from Goldman employees and their kin.
Imagine someone with a southern drawl – I’ve got one – standing in front of a bunch of one-sided donors and purring some lines like these:
“Now, you know, I don’t know what Obama and that old boy from Goldman talked about, but here is what I am hearing. Tiddlywinks. They talked about tiddlywinks. That’s as far as it got. You think they talked about financial regulation or anything like that? No sirree, sir. Just tiddlywinks.”
But wait, how about serious discourse? Did Obama ever consider that sticking to analysis of issues might be more fitting for his office than cutesy ad hominem attacks, demagoging Wall Street or simply insisting that whatever any critic says is a lie, as he did in the health insurance debate and is doing again this time around?
Maybe the answer is that he quakes at people really understanding that the regulations he and fellow Democrats so love would give the government incredible new powers simply to take over major financial institutions when in the judgment of the treasury secretary they were at serious risk, or maybe he has no good answer for how the regulations would rob consumers of choice and – in the view of some serious students of all of this – thereby could do major damage to the institutions and the economy as well.
My own broad take on the question is informed by a joke my father used to tell about a bird that flew backwards. “He didn’t know where he was going,” my father would say, “but he sure knew where he had been.” That’s about as good as most regulation gets – it protects against what happened in the past and does virtually nothing to stop what might happen in the future.
The obvious reason is that we cannot see future financial misadventures any better than European airlines could foresee a volcano’s impact on their business this year.
In this case, the Democrats aren’t even doing a very good job of examining the past – the role played in this recession by our quasi-governmental friends, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the governmental encouragement for people to buy unaffordable homes or the local-government restrictions that made some home costs soar.
The truth is, government did as much as Wall Street executives to produce the recession. It seldom heeds that regulatory document called the Constitution, but cannot help but heed those regulators known as voters who have their say this November.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
