A turncoat's baggage
Another incumbent politician bites the dust
A turncoat's baggage
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Once again, the voters have signaled that 2010 is likely to be a bad year for incumbents - especially for those who are perceived as turncoats.
Last night, in Alabama, congressman Parker Griffith got the Arlen Specter treatment. In other words, he was fired by an electorate that didn't buy his recent party switch and instead decided that he was just a rank opportunist trying to keep his job.
Griffith was actually Specter's mirror image; last December, he split from the Democrats and donned the GOP label, figuring that he had a better chance to win re-election as a Deep South Republican. He gave himself five months to convince Republican primary voters that he was one of them. But last night he managed to convince only 33 percent. The majority chose a county commissioner, Mo Brooks, who insisted that he was the true Republican in the race. Brooks fatally tagged Griffith as a "flip-flopper," and drew strong support from the tea-party crowd.
The broad parallels to the Specter saga are striking. Just as the Democratic establishment had rallied to Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, the Republican establishment quickly embraced Griffith when he switched parties. House GOP leader John Boehner headlined a Griffith fundraiser, and various Boehner colleagues opened their checkbooks for Griffith, who vastly outspent Brooks and a third candidate. The party establishment assumed that Griffith would be welcomed, especially since previous Alabama Democrats had seamlessly switched to the GOP (for instance, Senator Richard Shelby) without suffering any local voter backlash.
Also last winter, GOP chairman Michael Steele hailed Griffith as a guy whose "principles and values" were "right for America" - which was actually quite hilarious, given the fact that, in the 2008 House campaign, the Republican establishment had assailed Griffith as soft on terrorists and therefore "wrong for Alabama," and in TV ads it had slimed his medical credentials (he's an oncologist) by claiming that he had been "under-dosing" his cancer patients.
Yet, all of a sudden, in the spring GOP primary, here was the GOP establishment touting Griffith as a certified Republican loyalist. The problem was, too many Alabama Republican voters still remembered how the GOP leaders had beaten up on Griffith a mere 19 months ago. So last night the voters dismissed the leaders' revisionism as a phony exercise - just as Pennsylvania's Democratic voters spurned their party establishment's strategic embrace of former foe Specter.
Clearly, the leaders of both parties are on notice: Voters this year have little tolerance for political insiders who appear to be practicing politics as usual. And party-switchers who seek only to maximize their re-election prospects are seen as the worst offenders.
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The sole proprietor of this blog is on the road for the month of June. Virtually all June posts will be briefer than the norm, except on those rare occasions when posts won't show up at all. Apologies in advance for this disturbance in the force. The standard verbosity will return on Monday, June 28.
Thanks, Welbourn and Fascinated, for the research. To say Fannie and Freddie had no part in the subprime crisis is like a Barney Fwank talking point, although I'm not even sure he's actually taken that untenable position.— pj katauskas- Actually, pj, their research (to the extent it is anything but anecdotal) agrees with what I said except that apparently, fixed rate (not adjustable) loans are available from Fannie and Freddie below 10% down. Still, it was their INVESTMENT in mortgage backed securities permitted by Republican deregulation (and they actively opposed efforts to control the back end derivative market that caused the collapse---sold by guys like Toomey) that caused their demise. The default rates of the $500,000 mortgages in the Sunbelt are astronomically higher than the Fannie/Freddie loans. More importantly, the big mortgages on those properties never would have been made without international funds drawn in under the false belief that they had little or no risk since companies like S&P and Moodys rated them as Triple A and "rock solid" companies like AIG "guaranteed" the securities. This is the money (not federal money to Fannie and Freddie) that went on line looking for loans. It really is apples and oranges. The Fannie/Freddie collapse was not based on the loans they made---it was based on the fact that they invested in the same Ponzi scheme everyone else did. Spread the blame around for that, and there is plenty to go around, but stop repeating the canard that loans by Fannie and Freddie to the poor had anything to do with this. They didn't.— Palestra Jon
- tom: don't interpret any of that to mean that I am opposed to an investigation - I'm not. I am for one. But the investigation should focus on what job, if any, was offered. But based upon what all parties have said, I can't see how it's illegal.— still_independent
- Palestra, what you fail to not understand is that Fannie and Freddie set the guidelines under which those loans were enacted. Don't you recall when applying for a mortgage how it had to meet certain FHA requirements? Same with Fannie and Freddie. They set the guidelines, they set what Maxine Waters called "innovative products", like "desktop underwriting" and "100% financing". This was all done to increase minority and poor home ownership. Also, in case you missed it, the FHA is now able to guarantee mortgages I believe up to $750K, as are Fannie and Freddie also. Many of these mortgages also qualify as subprime since the borrowers took ARMS at 1 or 2% for 5 or 10 years and they are now adjusting upwards, which is causing defaults. BTW, those ARMS were another "innovative" product from F&F, as previously described by Maxine Waters.— tom - wilmington, de
- pj : "say Fannie and Freddie had no part in the subprime crisis ..." who said this? I could just as easily misstate your position as "Fannie and Freddie were the sole cause of the subprime crisis" and then demonstrate that it wasn't true. Fannie and Freddie played a role to be sure - but just how large a role is VERY debatable.— still_independent
- What is really funny about this is that back in December, 2005, McCain and Bush wanted to rein in Fannie and Freddie, but Democrats in the Senate promised to filibuster. In fact, in 2006 our current President was one of those who led the charge to filibuster any regulation of Fannie and Freddie. During the election, Obama and the Dems (as well as many on this site) chastised Republicans for not tightening regulation on the mortgage market as well as Fannie and Freddie. BUT, when Republicans tried to get F&F added to the Financial Reform bill that passed in the Senate, ALL BUT TWO DEMOCRATS voted AGAINST the amendment. So, Democrats chastise Republicans for not tightening regulation, then vote against adding F&F to the bill that could regulate them. Instead, Dodd said he would have a study done to see what effect regulation would have on F&F, saying they were extremely complex. What hypocrites.— tom - wilmington, de
- tom : did you actually read the ammendment? It doesn't reform Fannie or Freddie. It basically ends their charter and seperates them from the federal government. In the interim, it does force them to lower their mortgage portfolio by 10% a year (no clue how to do that), and repeals the affordable housing goals - which were sort of the point of their existence. Basically, the ammendment was to turn Fannie/Freddie into private entities. This may be an admirable goal, but let's not pretend that it's "reform" - it's demolition. Oh, and good luck w/ the housing market w/ no Fannie/Freddie there to back loans. Go ahead and lop another 10% or 20% off of the value of your home.— still_independent
- Tom, there is a basic fact that you and pj simply ignore. Mortgages held by Fannie and Freddie were NOT securitized, and thus, are not part of the securitized pools that were the problem leading to the economic collapse of 2008. So again, rather than throw out talking points, which might well have some merit were they not tied to unsupportable conclusions, what evidence do you have that Fannie and Freddie loans were any significant portion of the CMO's that almost brought down our economy? I thought so.— Palestra Jon
- Hey, Mike, I'm not interested in quibbling with you. If F & F played ANY role, don't you think Fwank and Dodge and other "reform-minded" Ds should include them in the financial reform package? Unless F & F's role was truly de minimis, which it wasn't, explain why they weren't included in these reforms that are supposed to make the financial markets safer. What's the rationale for leaving them out? Could it be politics, with F & F overwhelmingly favoring Ds with contributions? Nah,impossible.— pj katauskas
- Another reason why Republicans are never to be trusted to govern this country again: Bush says he’d waterboard KSM again: “Waterboarding Mohammed 183 times didn’t save any lives. In fact, Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA after withstanding torture. Additionally, a former Special Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq has stated that waterboarding has actually cost American lives: “The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.” Republicans are a disgrace to humanity. Also: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/16/nation/na-cia-detainee16— The Bishop
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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