Wednesday, April 02, 2008

HILLARY CLINTON, JOHN MCCAIN

Hillary's "3 a.m." Sequel Ad Misfires

Perhaps eager to prove to Democrats that she can hit Republicans as hard as she's hit Barack Obama in recent weeks, Hillary has come out with a sequel to her "3 a.m." ad, entitled, "Ringing."

Announcer: It’s 3 am, and your children are safe and asleep.

But there’s a phone ringing in the White House and this time the crisis is economic.

Home foreclosures mounting, markets teetering.

John McCain just said the government shouldn’t take any real action on the housing crisis, he’d let the phone keep ringing.

Hillary Clinton has a plan to protect our homes, create jobs.

It’s 3 am, time for a president who’s ready.

Hillary Clinton: I’m Hillary Clinton and I approve this message.

The problem is, while it's very plausible to suggest that a president would be awakened at 3 a.m. with word of a national security crisis suddenly developing overseas, it's really hard to imagine a situation in which the phone would ring in the White House at that hour to report "home foreclosures mounting, markets teetering." Most of the U.S. markets close at 4 p.m.

And the signs of the housing bubble, at the very least, have been building for months, if not years. And U.S. banks pretty much foreclose on mortgages during regular business hours; there wouldn't be any new news to report at 3 a.m..

John McCain didn't say that the government shouldn't take any real action; he laid out the principles of any action under a McCain administration. Apparently Hillary thinks that all of the following common sense lines in the sand aren't "real" enough for her:

In our effort to help deserving homeowners, no assistance should be given to speculators. Any assistance for borrowers should be focused solely on homeowners, not people who bought houses for speculative purposes, to rent or as second homes. Any assistance must be temporary and must not reward people who were irresponsible at the expense of those who weren’t. I will consider any and all proposals based on their cost and benefits. In this crisis, as in all I may face in the future, I will not allow dogma to override common sense.

When we commit taxpayer dollars as assistance, it should be accompanied by reforms that ensure that we never face this problem again. Central to those reforms should be transparency and accountability.

Homeowners should be able to understand easily the terms and obligations of a mortgage. In return, they have an obligation to provide truthful financial information and should be subject to penalty if they do not. Lenders who initiate loans should be held accountable for the quality and performance of those loans and strict standards should be required in the lending process.

Listening to Hillary's speech on this, I wondered if she would call her program the Tough Luck For First Time Home Buyers Act, as she seems to think that the ballooning prices of recent years were entirely good news, and that no decline in prices is ever a necessary correction or good news on the whole:

When I talk about the home foreclosure crisis, sometimes people, I can tell, look at me a little skeptically because they, I can tell, they're thinking to themselves, I didn't buy one of those mortgages, I don't have an ARM, I’m not at risk. But, in fact, that is just not the case. Home prices dropped almost 9% last quarter. Home prices for everyone. If you have paid off your home, if you have a fixed rate mortgage with a manageable interest rate, you have suffered the steepest decline on record. That means families have lost at least $1.9 trillion in housing wealth so far, nearly two-thirds of the size of the entire United States government budget. And today, nearly 9 million families are struggling with mortgages that are under water. They actually owe more for their mortgages than their homes are worth. So what was once their biggest financial asset is now a financial liability.

Yes, but the median price of an existing home from 2000 to 2006 increased by 50 percent. That's way outside of historical average, and made purchasing a house for first-time buyers nearly impossible. (In her big how-I'll-save-American-homeowners speech, the word "bubble" never appears.)

And, while this joke worked every bit as well as when the ad aimed at Obama, according to this ad, we're supposed to believe that Hillary will answer the phone, with her glasses on, hair done, makeup finished...

04/02 06:04 PMShare