Palin’s Policies: Getting it Wrong on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
From the Huffington Post:
Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.”
As the HuffPo’s Sam Stein notes, the major problem with this statement is that when Palin made these comments over the weekend, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were not taxpayer funded, which suggests, in Stein’s words, “a lack of understanding about one of the key economic issues likely to face the next administration.” And remember: Palin was reading from a teleprompter when she said this, which means you can’t put this down to a momentary flub or memory lapse. (And which also suggests that the McCain campaign doesn’t have as good a grip on economic issues as they’d like us to believe.)
But there’s a second problem here: if Palin thought that the companies were “too expensive to the taxpayers” before, how does she feel about the takeover of the two mortgage companies that was announced yesterday, which could cost taxpayers up to $200 billion? Does she agree with her running mate the takeover was necessary? If she does, then what the hell was she talking about in Colorado Springs? If she doesn’t, then what’s her rationale for bucking today’s uniform chorus of praise for Henry Paulson’s bailout plan?
3 Comments
I have seen a video of her speech, and it is clear that McCain did not flinch when she said that, as you note, “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had ‘gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.’” Neither, for that matter, did the audience: they cheered and applauded the line. I was tempted to put parentheses around the “n.”
One wonders, in view of things, whether this is really, as HuffPo wants to paint it, a gaffe. How can absurdities (to say the least) about “cutting taxes” be called a gaffe when they succeed with voters again and again?
Or, to put it another way, God help us, how did these flimsy self-parodies become a legitimate part what we affectionately call the public sphere? And, of course, knowing the answer doesn’t, in itself, help.
Sep 8th, 2008
Boyd, I’m with you on the gaffe. I was thinking exactly the same thing, which is why I avoided using the word in my post.
After all, this cuts so much deeper than a gaffe. It’s not about making a momentary mistake or (as in the Kinsleyan version of the gaffe) telling an accidental truth; it’s about not having a clue. Even if you concede that it’s not important for Palin to know how the GSEs are structured–which I don’t, but never mind that for a second–there’s still the very serious issue of what her criticism of them could mean. What I fear (but also suspect) it means is that she has no more idea about how the national economy works than John McCain does.
Sep 8th, 2008
I think your fears and suspicions are exactly right, Bobby. The problem, of course, is that many voters are as confused as Palin and McCain appear to be. And the media isn’t helping: at Jake Tapper’s “Political Punch,” one of the few places I saw coverage of this story (besides HuffPo), hundreds of comments came in defending Palin. Here’s one at random:
Huh? And so on.
Sep 9th, 2008
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