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TARP: Success that none dare mention
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Issue
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| Contributor | Imperator |
| Last Edited | Imperator Sep 15, 2010 03:21pm |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Ben Smith |
| News Date | Tuesday, September 14, 2010 09:20:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The Obama administration this week will mark the second anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing Wall Street meltdown with an ironic bit of bipartisanship: letters of thanks to some of the congressional Republicans who helped fashion the government’s response in fall 2008.
No one in the Treasury Department is expecting any appreciation from House Minority Leader John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or former House Minority Whip Roy Blunt for the gesture. In a reversal of the old adage quoted by President John F. Kennedy, that victory has a thousand fathers, there’s hardly a Republican who wants to be associated with perhaps the most successful and least popular American economic policy in the past decade: TARP, or as it is generally known, the bank bailout.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program is widely viewed as the original sin of the Obama administration — though it was put together under President George W. Bush and succeeded far beyond expectations. It’s widely seen as the tipping point for disgust with elites and insiders of all kinds — though it could also be seen as those insiders’ finest moment, a successful attempt to at least partially fix their own mistakes.
Rammed through Congress in the final months of the Bush administration by a political and financial establishment that felt it had looked into the abyss, TARP had the support of not just President Barack Obama but also his likely foes in 2012, such as former Govs. Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. But it has been only sporadically defended, or even explained, by leaders of both parties who have shown decidedly little courage of their convictions.
“It’s become demonized on the left and the right by screamers — Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow — who have no interest in the facts; they’re just interested in hyperbolizing and generating attention,” lamented New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, a key player in guiding the measure through the uppe |
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