“Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) will not run for re-election for a 17th term. He’ll hold a press conference at 1 pm ET to discuss his decision,” Political Wire reports.
To crib from a post I wrote in August on the Community Reinvestment Act, back in late September of 2008, just as the financial crisis was simultaneously devouring Wall Street and paving the way for their preferred candidate’s victory a month later, Kevin D. Williamson wrote at NRO that for the left, the CRA was a can’t-lose proposition:
Imagine if the housing bubble hadn’t burst, but there hadn’t been all those dodgy subprime loans made and then securitized. We’d be reading stories about how America is having a wonderful housing boom but the poor and minorities are being left out. There’s lots of greed and stupidity in this story, but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that a big part of what is wrong comes from bad public policy designed to encourage homeownership, particularly among the poor. Unintended consequences are not to be denied.
But we’re not going to hear much about ACORN’s role in all this, or, by extension, Senator Obama’s.
That could be changing, Walter Russell Mead noted in August:
According to the Washington Post, President Obama has decided to support a continuing government role in the housing market and plans to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac operating with government guarantees into the indefinite future.
The decision is a GOP dream come true and could play a significant role in the campaign.
If you wanted to link ACORN and community organizers with Wall Street profiteers and nationally unpopular liberal icons like Barney Frank, handing the Fannie Mae issue to the GOP in 2012 is the way to do it. Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner laid out a GOP roadmap in Reckless Endangerment. According to their (controversial) account, Fannie Mae was a kind of Democratic Enron as poverty hustlers united with Wall Street profiteers to rape the Treasury while abusing the poor; the net cost to the taxpayers for Fannie and Freddie could well reach $389 billion.
Imagine the ads.
Lots of material in this 2008 video to work with, if anybody in the GOP has the brains (yes, that’s a risky proposition right there) not to let this crisis go to waste:
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