Drilling Down on the Facts in McCain’s Speech
By Larry Rohter
Speaking in Albuquerque on Monday, Senator John McCain attacked Senator Barack Obama on several fronts that by now have become familiar. But many of his charges relating to the economic meltdown, taxation and health care contained inaccuracies or exaggerations of his own position or Mr. Obama’s.
For instance, Mr. McCain claimed that “as recently as September of last year,” Mr. Obama “said that subprime loans had been, quote ‘a good idea.’” But that quote is taken out of context and reverses the intent of Mr. Obama’s remarks, which were clearly meant primarily as a criticism of practices on Wall Street.
“Subprime lending started off as a good idea helping Americans buy homes who couldn’t previously afford to,” Mr. Obama said in a speech to NASDAQ in September 2007. But, he added, “as certain lenders and brokers began to see how much money could be made, they began to lower their standards. Some appraisers began inflating their estimates to get the deals done. Some borrowers started claiming income they didn’t have just to qualify for the loans, and some were engaging in irresponsible speculation. But many borrowers were tricked into glossing over the fine print.”
Mr. McCain also said that Mr. Obama “was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in.” That oversimplifies a complicated situation that was the subject of partisan wrangling dating back to the 1990s, long before Mr. Obama arrived in the Senate in 2005.
From his remarks, it would appear that Mr. McCain is referring in part to the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act, which Democrats did oppose when it was introduced in 2005. But they did so vocally, not silently, because they saw the proposal as fundamentally flawed.
But Republicans controlled the Senate and its agenda then. That suggests that Mr. McCain’s Republican colleagues, some of whom opposed regulation of markets on purely philosophical grounds, had at least in part a hand in the bill’s failure to come to a final vote.
In addition, Mr. McCain exaggerates his own role in efforts to prevent abuses at the federally-chartered companies. “I was the one who called at the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped prevent this crisis from happening in the first place,” he said. In reality, Mr. McCain signed on to the 2005 bill in May 2006 and was not one of its original sponsors.
Mr. McCain also criticized Mr. Obama’s policies on taxes, in language similar to last month’s first debate, with a few new fillips. But fact-checking organizations have already repeatedly dismissed the bulk of the accusations he made as inaccurate or exaggerated.
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http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/drilling-down-on-the-facts-in-mccains-speech/
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