(I should say, nothing against boring old white guys. I hope to become one some day. But if New York dining reflected the tastes of the older partners in law firms and I-banks, ours too would be a culinary wasteland. I know because largely the restaurants near where I work reflect their taste or the taste of tourists. Fortunately, there are younger, hipper areas in this city with younger, hipper restaurants.)

Geoff J.,

Here is the speech she gave:

Link here.

Not a smart move.

BTW – DKL, I think most Americans are ignorant enough such that Congressional ratings tend to track Presidential ones but will always be somewhat lower. Put an other way I don’t think it tells us much. Of course I think Pelosi and Reid have a lot to be ashamed over. (If they thought there were problems where were the bills the last few years?)

But all this just reenforces my “a pox on both their houses” view. I honestly and sincerely don’t think they are taking any of this seriously. And this is a scary situation. To all you Democrats with your “Impeach Bush” bumperstickers, can I get an “Impeach Reid and Pelosi” bumpersticker?

It doesn’t matter what Pelosi called the Republicans.

The fact is that she had more than 90 members of her own caucus who didn’t vote for the bill that she negotiated.

The reason that happened, is because they knew that if the bill failed, they would point a blaming finger at the Republicans and then pass an uncompromised leftist bill.

She most likely gave the inflamatory speech in order to guarantee the loss on the bill.

Why give a speech like that when you’re trying to secure PASSAGE? Maybe because you want the bill to fail.

So, only a third of the Republicans supported it and it is Pelosi’s fault for it failing. I thought that we loved Democrats that bucked the leadership.

I fully agree with Clark (#5 and #6). It the two of us can agree, then Washington should be able to pull something out.

From Jim Geraghty:

From Pelosi’s speech:

…We confront a crisis of historic magnitude that has the ability to do serious injury not simply to our economy, but to the American people: not just to Wall Street, but to everyday Americans on Main Street. It is our responsibility today, to help avert that catastrophic outcome. Let us be clear: This is a crisis caused on Wall Street. But it is a crisis that reaches to Main Street in every city and town of the United States.

Forty percent of her caucus listened to her argument and concluded, “Give me the catastrophic outcome.”

HT: Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online.

#10 -

Yes Pelosi gets the blame.

The House of Representatives, unlike the Senate, is absolutely controlled by the majority. There is an old saying that the minority of the House is the most oppressed minority in the country. The minority has absolutely no power in the House.

Pelosi had a big press conference where she announced she had reached a deal. She should have known if she had enough votes from her party to pass the bill. The majority should never bring a bill to the floor without the votes to pass it.

Pelosi negotiated it with the White House. It was her party’s bill. With 1/3 of the republicans voting for it, she should have been able to deliver the win with votes from her party. She only needed 11 more of the more than 90 that voted against it.

This was never the House Republican’s bill. They were never going to get a majority of Republicans to vote for it. It was understood that the Democrats (who have a solid majority in the body) would have to pass it.

Speaker Pelosi wanted to play it both ways, and that’s what makes her a terrible leader.

But a good politician. Imagine if the Republicans would have fallen for that one!

Bush and Pelosi and Reid are the ones who are taking this particular massive problem seriously. The problem is that they can’t convince enough of their own parties to do the same.

It’s understandable Bush can’t convince people given his lame duck status. That Pelosi or Reid couldn’t means she’s an incompetent leader. End of story.

Second, Americans do not like this bill, and many of them were going to vote for it over objections from their constituents. From what I’ve heard, Congressional offices have been barraged with calls, 9 to 1 against the bill.

With few willing to support any compromise bill at all. The problem is that no one wants to imagine compromise. It’s my way or the destruction of the country.

Peter LLC: [trying to have it both ways makes Speaker Pelosi] a good politician. Imagine if the Republicans would have fallen for that one.

Actually, she’s a very poor politician. Good politicians don’t get caught doing this sort of thing. Bill Clinton was a good politician, and that’s why he gave Republicans fits — they could never make him pay the price for constantly having it both ways (remember how futile their claims of Clinton flip-flops were?)

I repeat: Speaker Pelosi should resign.

Pelosi had a big press conference where she announced she had reached a deal. She should have known if she had enough votes from her party to pass the bill. The majority should never bring a bill to the floor without the votes to pass it.

The Dems version of Mission Accomplished?

“my 6.5 years of graduate school in political science”

As my grandpa always said, “that and a [Dollar (due to inflation)] will buy you a Coke.”

#23

Many in safe seats voted against the bill (for example, only 4 Republicans from Texas voted for the bill).

Bill and Julie, that has no bearing on the current bill.

Furthermore, your positions is (characteristically) a much more extreme position. Bush was elected president by a majority twice. I’m not proposing that Pelosi resign from her seat in Congress, just from her leadership position. The point isn’t to invalidate an election, but to restructure the hierarchy among the elected.

Also characteristically, you don’t seem to have thought past the consequences of your rage. if Bush had resigned, Cheney would be president. Is that what you really want?

Julie: The only thing this plan would have done is make wall street consulting firms rich. You should consider doing more than just reading the headlines at Drudge.

So where do I say that this was a good bill, Julie?

Devyn S: I think it is silly to blame Pelosi — there is more than enough blame to go around on this. I think the largest issue is that the general public does not understand the need for the “bailout” when in reality the failure of the financial system will hurt everyone, not just in the US either…

Pelosi has been as emphatic about the need for this bill as anyone. If she’d taken a principled position that this bill was a bad idea, then we’d have something to argue about. If she’d have gotten this bill passed on strict party lines, then we’d have something to talk about. But the Republicans delivered a full third of their caucus, and she couldn’t garner enough votes from her own caucus to put the bill over the top.

Hers is a failure of leadership by the standards that she set for herself during the past week.

Ok, so maybe the Speaker of the House isn’t a good politician. Still, she does have the good sense not to ram a deal through with Democratic support only, and not just to maintain dubious claims to bipartisanship. Besides, resigning smacks of European parliamentary politics–do we really want to go down that road?

Well I suspect members of congress who voted against the bill will be hearing from all kinds of constituents who are unhappy about 7-10% of their retirement fund disappearing today. I’ll bet it would pass if they voted again tomorrow. (I know I left a message expressing my displeasure with my congressman.)

“Bush was elected president by a majority twice.”

I will concede that he was elected by a majority of U.S. voters once (in 2004).

Hard to believe that, in combination with GOP leaders, the GOP president could not get more than 33% of his own party to back his own proposal. Well, maybe it is not that hard to believe.

Right. Twice “by a majority” was off by a factor of two. I was inverting the fact that Bill Clinton failed twice to receive a majority.

David H, I consider it to be quite remarkable that they could get a full third of Republicans to vote in favor of a bill that (a) made their skin crawl on philosophical grounds, and (b) bailed out the Democrats’ malfeasance.

Reagan and Volcker tightened the money supply, and from 1980-1982 there was massive unemployment and double-digit interest rates. But few economists dispute the fact that this cleansed the economy of inflation (which had been double-digit in the late 70s) and set the foundation for more than 20 years of unprecedented growth. Moreover, it’s pretty clear that half-measures could never have accomplished this, but would have both prolonged the economic misery and made it more difficult to correct later.

A lot of Republicans feel like a bailout will prolong the current economic problems rather than solve them. They say that if there are bad loans and bad credit and a resulting tightening of the money supply, then the best thing to do is bite the bullet, weather the storm, jettison the nonsense about lending discrimination, and never pursue such aggressive home-lending policies again.

It’s the Democrats who have no excuse. Not only did they cause the problem, but solving it by throwing tax money at it is right up their ally.

1. Why did the GOP administration (apparently agreed to by GOP congressional leaders) propose a bill that no more than one-third of the GOP could support?

2. Why was the GOP unable to stop the Democrats’ malfeasance during the years the GOP controlled the Congress and President?

SARCASM ALERT: 3. I assume the people who packaged the subprime loans to disfavored classes, who rated them, who valued them, who sold them, and who purchased them on behalf of Wall Street bankers and hedge funds were all Democrats (perhaps those Wall Street firms and hedge funds were community organizers in disguise)?

DKL – I don’t see how delivering 33% of the Republicans is a win on a bill that was supported by their President? I think both sides failed in this miserably, but may change their minds and find a good compromise in the near future. Personally, I am sick of the Dems and Reps blaming each other and thinking the other side can do no good. It is getting downright ludicrous. It seems as if the Reps would be happy if all the Dems disappeared and vice versa…

DavidH, this is old territory. By your childish and ignorant sarcasm alert, it’s obvious that you want to blame it on greed the private sector. You might as well blame it the greed of home buyers wanting more housing than they could afford. In either case, you’d be spinning a yarn based on your pre-conceived notions of how such things work rather than on what actually happened.

I’ve already had that conversation with a random john on another thread. The Government Sponsored Enterprises bill, passed in 1992, created quotas for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These quotes encouraged “affordable” and “underserved” mortgages. “Underserved” is officially defined as “low-income census tracts or in low- or middle-income census tracts with high minority populations.” This was a direct response to a study by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, which concluded that home lending practices were highly discriminatory.

HUD raised these quotes. First, under Clinton to require 21% of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans to go to “underserved areas.” Then, under Bush, HUD raised the quota for “underserved” area loans to 39%(!)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bundle the mortgages together, and then they insure them. There’s basically zero risk. That’s why they needed a bailout. And the ineffectiveness of the insurance is a large part of what led to the failure of so many other mortgage-backed securities.

In 2003, this policy had been underway for a decade, and was wreaking havoc. Here’s an article from The New York Times detailing the argument that people were having about revising oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Barney Frank defends the two entities:

“These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

(Frank made statements to this effect for years, and, at the very least, he should recuse himself from the current debate on the solution.)

Both Democrats and Republicans share some blame. The Democrats aggressively pursued social policy through America’s lending system, while too many Republicans stood by, afraid to act lest they be called racist for advancing lending practices that disproportionately impacted Hispanics and Blacks; e.g., 20% down payments and tradition debt-to-income ratios as a measure of credit-worthiness.

It’s funny you bring up community organizers. ACORN, the group for which Obama worked in Chicago when he was a “community organizer,” aggressively sued banks that used traditional credit-worthiness measures to determine credit-worthiness of loan applicants, arguing that such objective measures were discriminatory.

All of this caused the subprime mortgage problem, which caused an anomalous number of home-loan failures, which led to the current credit crisis.

In 2005, McCain sponsored the “Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, saying, “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”

With so many Democrats complaining about alleged Republican cow-towing to “Big Oil,” you would think that someone would want to hold Democrats like Barney Frank, Dodd, and Obama accountable for their corrupt relationship to Big Mortgage. All of these guys received top dollar from large mortgage companies.

And thus we see that the principles of economics must be fulfilled, and if the sons of men heed not the principles of economics, casting them aside in the name of diversity, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Geoff J, I am not sure what the best solution to this mortgage crisis is, but in spite of my misgivings, I’m willing to go with the experts. The economists who I trust (e.g., Larry Kudlow) share my misgivings, but argue convincingly that the bailout is the best solution.

That said, one thing that I’m absolutely sure of is this: The current situation has absolutely nothing to do with 1929. By today’s standards, the 1929 US was a third world country. The economy in which the depression occurred is so different from our own that most foreign countries (1st, 2nd, or 3rd word) are more similar to our own economy than to the US in 1929. The claim that this will be 1929 all over again is sensationalistic nonsense that doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

Devyn, 12 of the 37 Democratic members of Barney Frank’s own committee (“The House Financial Services Committee”) voted against this bill. It failed because Speaker Pelosi didn’t lead.

This bill was a horrible idea and I for one am glad it failed. It will not rescue the stock market in any meaningful way, and frankly #41, if granny and grandpa had $500k in stocks instead of safer assets then they were asking for trouble. The banking system needs to be recapitalized badly, but wasting $700b of taxpayer money to assume their bad debts and socialize the losses is not the way to do it. Plus, it’s becoming questionable whether foreign countries are even going to continue loaning us the money to pay for all these things given the administration’s refusal to support the dollar.

Geoff, it’s also worth noting that the accusation that the current mess was caused by Republican-driven deregulation and anti-reregulation. This is the exact opposite of the truth. It was Republicans (including McCain) who to pushed for tighter regulatory control and more Congressional oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while the Democrats fought it tooth-and-nail.

DKL,

The leap of logic was you pinning the entire subprime meltdown on the attempts of some politicians to help more people become homeowners. Now I certainly will grant that the policies you mentioned contributes in some way to the overall problem I think it is utter silliness to imply that said policies were the primary causes of the problem. Rather I think it is a much safer claim to pin the majority of the blame on other issues like:

A) The deregulation in December 2000 sponsored by John McCain’s former financial adviser and campaign co-chair Phil “nation of whiners” Gramm. The law, called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which was reportedly written by lawyers for the investment. This lovely legislation allowed for the opaque and completely unregulated derivative trading relating to mortgage backed securities (among other things).

B) The deep and sustained cuts in interest rates by Alan Greenspan for the first half of this decade that made lending and borrowing too much money more tempting than unregulated people can handle (clearly based on where we are today).

In other words, the attempts to help “underserved” people by those bleeding heart Democrats the non-bleeding-heart Republicans decry might have added to the problem, but they didn’t add much in my opinion. As you mentioned, those things had been going on since 1992 and we didn’t see this mess until now so pinning this on that small factor is indeed an unsupportable leap of logic.

Make that “lawyers for the investment banks”. It is also worth noting the Mr. Gramm’s legislation also included the “Enron Loophole”. We get this quote from the wiki:

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 has received criticism for the so-called “Enron Loophole,” 7 U.S.C. §2(h)(3) and (g), which exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. The “loophole” was drafted by Enron Lobbyists working with senator Phil Gramm[3] seeking a deregulated atmosphere for their new experiment, “Enron On-line”

Geoff, it’s your logic that is loopy. Your accusation that cheap mortgages caused the problem reminds me of the “First Citiwide Change Bank” skit on SNL. The bank does nothing but provide change — 10 dimes for a dollar, 5 nickels for a quarter, etc. The punch line: How do they make money? Volume!

Of course, you can’t make money by amplifying the frequency of a profit-less transaction. Likewise, you can’t lose money by amplifying the frequency of loss-free transactions.

Making loans to credit-worthy borrowers at prevailing rates in an economic environment free of volatile inflation is a loss-free transaction (or, strictly speaking, a loss-controlled transaction, because loss rates are as predictable as they are in the auto-insurance industry; that’s kinda’ the point). If you have credit-worthy borrowers, then you’ll generally get paid back, no matter what the interest rate. (And interests rates should be kept as low they can be kept without risking inflation — that’s why the Federal Reserve’s stance on interest rates is called monetary policy, not lending policy.)

By credit worthy, I’m referring to pre-1992 measures, like the ability to put 20% down and having an appropriate income-to-debt ratio and having a good credit score. And when you abandon the traditional loan-worthiness rules, you introduce the possibility of dramatically increased loan failure rates.

Furthermore, trading mortgage-backed securities (MBS) has nothing to do with the current crisis. If the loans are bad, they’re bad no matter who owns them, and if they’re good, then they’re good no matter who owns them. MBS’s simply transfered the ownership of the mortgages. Banks had always sold their mortgages through private transactions. The MBS law allows a mechanism for mortgages to be traded openly in a way that actually increases the accountability and transparency of the mortgage exchange transaction. As it happens, the MBS’s that are at risk are disproportionately subprime, for exactly the reasons that I point out above. Nearly half of these subprime MBS’s are from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who “insured” them, allowing them to pocket a fee from the buyer of the MBS for the insurance that didn’t prove to be worth anything at all. Again, it all leads back to affirmative action in lending.

And I’m not sure why anything is worth noting about “The Enron Loophole.” It’s a red-herring. It has less to do with the Enron scandal than Enron Field and chocolate — combined. It remains the law today, and it is seen as harmless except by a select few conspiracy minded populists who blame it for high oil prices(!)

Lastly, you seem to be buying into the entire slate of populist conspiracy theories about what’s wrong with the economy.

Take note of the BIll Clinton quote at the end of the previously linked video.

Tim J,

I’m no Democrat, I’m just an annoyed independent, so I don’t mind you pointing out times when Democrats fought against needed regulation at all.

BTW — I am wondering if there is really something to Jota’s #8 conspiracy theory.

I suspect that there will be nothing like a few days of the stock market crashing to get the people on Main Street to see that their congressional representative voting for this bill is not just bailing out Wall Street. I predict it will pass easily later this week.

Howard:So, what is a fair price for each of us to pay for easy availability of other kinds of loans?

I can’t write you a regression equation for that dependent variable, but one way or another the bad debts need to be lifted off the balance sheets of lending organizations. I can see why some would rather do this with loans than with outright purchases, but I can see a moral hazard in the loans as well.

That said, people are too hung up on the $700B and $2300-per-person figure, as if it is merely a debit. Much of those expenditures will be recovered as the acquired home loans are repaid, and thus have (some) value (not none).

woodboy, I agree that it’s unlikely they’ll clear a profit on the deal, but I doubt that the full figure will be lost as you seem to suggest. part of the problem here is that “one bad apple spoils the bunch” such that in a bundle of subprime mortgages it’s hard to know which ones will foreclose vs. being repaid, and that uncertainty is driving down the price / making them illiquid TODAY. over time however markets will clear and we’ll know how many of those mortgages are still worth something. don’t mistake the short run for the long run. for instance, I have a subprime mortgage but am at very little risk of default. there are many others like me out there. not every such loan will be worthless.

btw Thomas Sowell wrote a nice version of what DKL said about the root causes: Link here.

I am confused. After John McCain sped to DC in the batmobile last week and then proved useless in the process of shaping a compromise his campaign claimed that his great accomplishment was getting House Republicans onboard.

Senator McCain should not just suspend his campaign, he should withdraw his candidacy. Clearly he is a failed leader.

On a more serious note it is clear that cowardly House members from both sides wanted this to pass without their votes. Shame on them! Stand up for what is right and damn the political consequences. I’m impressed by Rep. Cannon, a lame duck, who did what was right here. Perhaps if we had more lame ducks this thing would have passed. To bad congress is more interested in staying in power than in exercising that power for good. Cowards.

Geoff J, arj is right about many of the mortgages being seconds. Plus, there’s a more than reasonable probability that some not-insignificant fraction of the homes will never sell (e.g., 1% to 2%, or even more). Look for a lot of people to return to renting after ditching the house that cost them a mint even though it was 2-full-hours outside of the city wherein they worked. And when you have an entire neighborhood of foreclosures, nobody’s going to want to be the first to purchase there. Nor will the buyers’ market make it desirable to do so. And the cost of maintaining longer-term vacant properties could easily eclipse whatever money could be extracted from their sale.

For my part, I don’t want tumbling house prices to be propped up. Everybody talks about the housing bubble like it’s a 21st century phenomenon. In 1998, I paid what I thought was an insane amount for a starter home — $60k more than it had sold for just a couple years earlier. By just 2002, the value of my house had increased to more than double the (already inflated) amount that I’d paid for it. To put this in perspective for you, home prices in most areas have retreated close to 2002/2003 levels; my house is still worth more than double the (already inflated) amount that I paid for it. The reason the housing spike seems so very recent is because in 2001 housing prices in major metro areas went from merely unaffordable to profoundly unaffordable. The housing market remains substantially overpriced, and needs to fall much further.

As it stands, the large metro areas of the USA are great places to live if you already own a home. If you don’t, heaven help you.

oh henry!, thanks for the link to the Sewell article. He’s actually an award-winning economist, so he’s a much better source for this kind of theory than I am.

Paulson should resign for bringing such a bold-faced proposal of grand theft of the american people. There’s no way his proposal was going to be acceptable as proposed. He and Bush seem to be saying, “Just put 700 billion in the bag and noone get’s hurt.” This is the most disgraceful proposal I’ve ever seen. Pelosi can resign too if you like. I have no tears for her. I’d love to see Sheehan take her place.

Tim J, (re #59), the video that you link to is a must watch! It’s nothing short of extraordinary. Congressmen Meeks, Waters, Clay, Davis, and Frank are the stupidest, most offensive elected officials in our republic. Their statements in the video are among the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in their rambling, incoherent utterances were they even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in attendance at that hearing is dumber now for having listened to them. I award them no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.

oh henry!, Carl Rove gave that explanation tonight on one of the Fox News shows. Other sources confirm parts of it. The Hill reports that:

And members on the left and right with philosophical objections could vote “no.” So could vulnerable members in tight races only a few weeks away, whose phones were ringing with the calls of angry constituents. [emphasis added]

And a variety of other papers note that the Democrats did very little whipping up of support and generally exerted very little pressure on the ranks. This is how things go down when the leaders are giving free passes — they’ve already identified the pro-votes, so they don’t exert leverage anywhere else. Doing anything more eliminates deniability.

This falls under the category of “procedural issues,” which Congressmen don’t typically complain about, because they look very whiny when they do and it’s difficult to explain Congressional procedures to voters. Imagine how it would look if they said, “Pelosi was giving passes to Democrats in tight races?” She’d just deny it anyway. If explanations of stuff like this are to make sense, they must be expressed by 3rd parties.

RickFFM, I’m glad you caught that

BTW, Here’s a link to the SNL First Citiwide change bank ad.

DKL,

The tight races explanation makes more sense than the one we were given by the GOP: Pelosi’s speech hurt my feelings. I hope the public doesn’t swallow that one.

I’d guess that there is a lot of scrambling going on in the House right now to patch this up.

Thus, Speaker Pelosi did her math wrong. She gave enough passes to the Democrats to push the bill through based on the assumption that she’d get 90 Republican votes (as promised). Speaker Pelosi didn’t count on them getting wind of the passes she gave to her fellow Democrats.

She did indeed do her math wrong. She took Boehner’s vote count at face value and added it to hers. But the fact that she was planning to give passes to Democrats in tight races and write off the far left was no secret. Republicans planned to do the same, but were betrayed by some who had not been issued passes.

DKL’s arguments remind me of conservative caricature of liberals blaming everybody but criminals for crime. When a bill that should have passed loses, the responsibility to for its defeat lies with those who voted against it.

Pelosi’s performance is a matter of internal Democratic business, which should be addressed when the new Congress convenes in January. Her performance yesterday certainly strengthens the argument that she should be dumped. You just can’t get your math wrong on something like this. But blaming her for the whole debacle is like blaming the cop for not preemptively arresting a thief for “looking suspicious.”

I am a lender and this quote is right on the money.

“The problem was that MBSs were priced assuming that 2% of the mortgages were bad and would fail when, it turns out, 4% or 6% or maybe 10% were bad and have or will fail”

DKL is also correct when he says that political pressure loosened credit requirements

The credit rating agency model is flawed. These people should be paid by those buying the bonds, not those issuing them, otherwise it represents a huge conflict of interest. We’ve all seen exactly how much a AAA rating is worth…

Wallison is full of crap Tim. He conveniently forgot to mention the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (signed in December 2000 and sponsored) in the article. That is the legislation that removed all regulations from the fake insurance known as “credit default swaps”. It was the rampant abuse of these credit default swaps that can be pointed to as one of the primary changes that brought us to our current mess.

Geoff,

Point taken.

It seems that there is more than enough blame to go around. Further some stupidly put non-pragmatic ideology ahead of thinking through consequences. I agree in minimal regulation. However if something is going to be de-regulated then you better damn well make sure that other policies are synced with that. They weren’t which is why the derivatives were a mess. Likewise if you are going to push risky loans to get more homes for the poor then you better make sure you have enough regulation. Instead we ended up with a “compromise” which was the worst of both.

With regard to leadership, I think everyone thinks Bush is a lost cost. Even Republicans. Blaming Republicans for not supporting Bush is ridiculous unless you think Pelosi is as bad as Bush. (For the record I do – but thankfully she has less power) Were I a Democrat though I’d be seriously pissed. Pelosi hasn’t done hardly any of the things she promised.

With regards to McCain if I hadn’t already been pushed over the line with regards to him this last week sure would have done it. And yes, I think his inability to bring Republicans on board is evidence that many Republicans really don’t see McCain as a real leader. What’s more interesting is the lack of leadership over Democrats that Obama showed. (Which I’ve not seen too many comment on)