The Blog @ Spolitics

Time Helps Obama with a Johnson Cleaning

In an article about how Obama’s sanctimonious outrage has come back to bite him in the ass, Time’s Michael Scherer writes:

And that outrage came back to haunt Barack Obama Wednesday when Jim Johnson, the man running his vice presidential search team, stepped down after the Wall Street Journal reported that he had received preferential deals on mortgages because he was friendly with an executive at Countrywide Financial, which has been tied to the subprime foreclosure crisis. 

Scherer deserves some credit for framing this as Obama’s comeuppance, but he then goes on to say it’s all much ado about nothing.  But it’s not.  It’s demonstrative of Obama’s blatant hypocrisy.  You just wouldn’t know it from this article because Scherer whitewashes an important point: Johnson didn’t get cheap loans from “an executive” at Countrywide.  He got them from the company’s CEO, Angelo Mozilo — a man Barack Obama personally blamed for the mortgage crisis.  To make matters worse, Johnson received those cheap loans while the company he headed, Fannie Mae, was doing business with Countrywide – a clear conflict of interest that Johnson didn’t disclose.  Countrywide couldn’t have — as Barack Obama put it — “infected the market”  with bad loans if GSE’s like Johnson’s Fannie weren’t buying them.  Given Johnson’s role in the mortgage crisis, why did Obama appoint Johnson to help him make the most important decision of his candidacy?  Those calls for “change” are certainly ringing hollow.