Matt Ortega

The latest attempt by conservatives to blame government regulation and minorities for the nation’s problems bites the dust. McClatchy reports:

As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that’s what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They’ve specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren’t true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

This video says it all — CNN snap polls:

TIME: Mark Halperin’s grades: LINK

Obama: B+
McCain: B

NBC (Shrum) 9:43 PM: “I think he won a win tonight, Barack Obama. Because I think the big headline of this debate is that people across the country more and more comfortable with the idea of President Obama. He projects a sense of calmness and strength that kind of grace under pressure that people prize in a president.”

MSNBC (Fineman) 11:10 PM: “Another good moment for Obama was when Obama basically took control of the foreign policy debate toward the end there.”

FOX News (Luntz)10:43 PM: “We seem to be getting winners out of this. Obama did better overall.”

CNN (Brown) 11:06 PM: “Number one, who did the best job in the debate? Obama 54%, McCain 30%. The debate watchers: opinion of Barack Obama, before the debate, your favorables at 60%, after the debate, they went up for Obama to 64%. Unfavorable for Obama at 38%, after the debate they went down to 34%. For John McCain, the opinion of John McCain, his favorables before the debate, 51% unchanged, after the debate again at 51%. His unfavorables 46%, and again, unchanged 46%.”

CNN (Bob Schneider): I’m not sure that McCain’s presenting of Iraq as a model for Afghanistan will be resonate with voters. LINK

TIME: I’m very distracted by McCain standing behind Obama and looking really, really mad. LINK

Washington Post Factchecker (Michael Dobbs): In outlining his tax policy, John McCain boasted that he would give all American families a $5,000 tax credit to allow them to go out and buy their own health insurance. This is true but it is only part of the story. The other part, which McCain rarely mentions on the campaign trail, is that the Republican candidate has also proposed taxing employer-provided health benefits, which will wipe out most of extra income from the tax credit. LINK

Washington Post Factchecker (Michael Shear): Sen. McCain claimed that Sen. Obama was the second-highest recipient of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “in history.”  Having received $105,849, he falls behind Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Christoper Dodd (D-Conn.) in third place, not second. And it’s unclear where McCain bases his claim that Obama is second “in history” since the sites that track these contributions don’t use that kind of duration. LINK

Chicago Tribune (Frank James): McCain says we need to do something about home values. He says he will order the Treasury Sec to buy up bad mortgages. “Is it expensive? Yes.” He says. Kind of conflicts with his statement a few words before that he would cut spending.  LINK

TNR  (Michael Crowley): Time after time tonight, McCain rushes and garbles his points so that many voters, I suspect, aren’t sure what he’s said. LINK

CNN (Hillary Rosen): I am fixated on the dial line at the bottom of the screen on CNN. Women are responding very enthusiastically to Obama. And women have been the larger part of the undecided vote in the battleground states. They like his specificity on tax cuts, the budget, education and energy. And now the environment has just sent both men and women to the top line. McCain only gets to the top line with either men or women when he is positive. Each time he criticizes Obama, the line flattens. LINK

Washington Post (Eugene Robinson): I think most viewers will decide that Obama won the debate, if only because he seemed more presidential and he represents a party other than George W. Bush’s. These encounters, I believe, are fundamentally unkind to John McCain. LINK

Talking Points Memo: “Clear, even decisive win for Obama tonight.” The debate’s relatively low-key tone, combined with a series of exchanges that Obama won by at minimum a marginal amount, translate into a clear, even decisive win for Obama tonight. There’s no point in mincing words: Time is running out for McCain.  As multiple observers have pointed out, McCain needed to jar the electorate into seeing this race in a new way. It isn’t even clear if McCain even tried to do this tonight — there was no moment where he appeared to make an aggressive bid to take down Obama or grab the initiative.  LINK

This is embarrassing, even by National Review standards where Jonah Goldberg is the editor, but Kathryn Jean Lopez is a little slow on the uptake.

COINCIDENCE? [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Question from a reader:

Does the selloff on Wall Street have anything to do with the increasing likelihood that Obama will be our next president?

Note that the two trends — the financial meltdown, despite passage of the bailout, and the solidification of Obama’s lead — are coinciding.  At a minimum, the market’s behavior is not a vote of confidence in an Obama presidency.

10/06 01:03 PM

American voters, by leaps and bounds, believe the economy is the most pressing issue facing the country right now and trust Senator Barack Obama over Senator John McCain on the issue. In the latest CBS News poll, “economy/jobs” was named the top priority almost five times more than the second-place answer: terrorism.

SkyNews in the United Kingdom seems to get it, not sure why Kathryn Jean Lopez or National Review readers are having a tough time understanding trends.

(Hat tip: Whiskey Fire)

In response to a weekend full of news articles stating that the Republican presidential ticket will roll out an increasingly negative campaign, the Obama/Biden campaigned released a 13-minute documentary that looks at the Keating Five scandal that nearly ended Senator John McCain’s (R-Arizona) political career early through the lens of the current financial crisis.

In just three hours, the video is nearing 200,000 views on YouTube. (Ed. note: There were audio issues with the original YouTube and a new version was posted, but the original surpassed 188,000 views.)

On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, the McCain campaign reversed nearly 20 years of repentance with the absurd claim that “McCain did nothing wrong” and that the Senate Ethics Committee investigation was just a “political smear job” against McCain.

But as many observers of McCain’s career will note, the Arizona senator fashioned himself as a reformer who was turned by his own brush with corruption — even admitting poor judgment in the matter. Now his people say he did nothing wrong. So does that mean the “maverick reformer” image was all built on a lie to puff up McCain’s once fledgling political career?

John’s post below contains the stunning admission from the McCain campaign that the Keating 5 investigation was an attempt to politically smear John McCain. For years, we’ve been hearing that McCain’s “reformer” image came from his claiming to have made amends for that scandal, which sunk 1,000 banks and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. But, now we know that McCain’s reform mantle is a fraud. McCain isn’t sorry for what happened. He’s sorry he got caught.

More on McCain and Keating here.

I guess they’re fresh out of bootstraps on Wall Street.

–Manuél Guzman
(Latino Político, 09/30/08)