Comments on: Palin’s Policies: Getting it Wrong on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

By: Boyd Nielson

Boyd Nielson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:35:36 +0000

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:

Obama, talking of possible changes to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, said: ‘We can’t have a situation in which, during boom times, management and investors are soaking up huge profits, taking extraordinary risks, and thinking to themselves that if they get into trouble because of these risky investments that somehow the taxpayers
are going to be there to bail them out.’

Once more. Here is Obama’s Statement. He says the same thing in his pompous class warfare liberal speak. but the bottom line is the same. cost to taxpayer

Huh? And so on.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 05:24:43 +0000

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.

By: Boyd Nielson

Boyd Nielson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:03:34 +0000

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.