Bill Clinton helped build that.
Yes. That needs to be part of the critique of the Romney administration.
7 thoughts on “The Housing Bubble”
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Bill Clinton helped build that.
Yes. That needs to be part of the critique of the Romney administration.
Comments are closed.
Yes, Clinton helped to create the housing bubble. However, Bush II certainly did everything he could to fuel it along. Bush II was no conservative in the Goldwater/Reagan sense and is also the reason why we got Obama in the first place.
You will notice that Bush II has made himself scarce during this election year (and rightly so). Like Clinton, he did lots of damage.
That’s not true, actually. Bush tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie, but Dodd and Frank fought him tooth and nail, and he eventually gave up, because he had limited political capital and other priorities. So you can say he failed, but it’s not true that he “did everything he could to fuel it along.”
Bush thought being able to buy a house with no down payment was a good idea, and said so in a speech during his first time. He did little to reign in Freddie and Fannie. It was coalition of 25 Republican senators and representatives that tried to reign these institutions in. Freddie and Fannie responded by lobbying (and bribing) all of the other Republican congress people who were not a part of this coalition (they had ALL of the Democrats on board, naturally).
Regardless, I think that the Republicans message should be, “We are living with the results of a bipartisan mess, but it wasn’t caused by low tax rates or deregulation, so much as too much government involvement in the economy. Republicans have learned our lesson. The Democrats clearly have not.”
I think this will help your argument, “Ownership Society.”
While Frum’s critique is true (though I would argue, not strong enough), I find it unlikely that Romney will use that. Instead, he will use Clinton’s relative popularity to help him, by using Clinton’s own words, both positive and negative.
About a month ago, Clinton said that Romney had a sterling business career. I’m sure that will eventually end up in an ad, if it hasn’t already.
And on the negative front, here is a Romney ad using Clinton to attack Obama:
Romney Claims Clinton
Bringing the concepts together, however, if Obama claims that he corrected the economic downturn caused by the bursting of the housing bubble, then we have to reply “You didn’t correct that!”