Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, May 12, 2012

This Is Good News For John McCain

In 2008, noted beneficiary of nepotism over merit Mark Halperin said that John McCain's inability to remember how many houses he had was "good news for John McCain".  It immediately became short hand for the cluelessness of the DC punditry, especially that at Politico.  As the Obama campaign said, "If Halperin says we're winning, we're losing.  If he says we're losing, we're winning."

Heh, indeedy.

Anyway, TPM puts on its Politico jacket.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/jp-morgan-obama-volcker.php

In a technical sense, they are right.  JPMorgan didn't break the rules because the rules were so poorly written.  And that is the fault of regulators in the Obama Administration.

True.  And irrelevant.

The Morgan story does not highlight the unfortunate loopholes in Dodd-Frank.  It reinforces the message of OWS and others who complain that Wall Street continues to skate free of the problems they created in 2008. 

Precisely because the GOP is running the former CEO of Bain Capital, they can't attack Obama on being close to Jamie Dimon or the weakness of a bill that they have all vowed to repeal, weak though it may be. 

Subtlety has never been a forte of the American electorate.  All they see in this story is Wall Street behaving badly again.  The OWS crowd may complain about Obama's closeness to Wall Street, but there's close and there's R-Money.

That doesn't require subtlety to figure out.

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