John McCain's very bad week

I think John Podhoretz is exactly right when he talks about why John McCain has been such a dismal choice for conservatives to support this past week.

Substantively, this has been the worst week of John McCain’s campaign — and I mean since its beginning, in early 2007. With a perfect argument to make on his own behalf — that he saw the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and called them out in 2005 while others were still angling for their largesse, and that therefore he possesses the experience and demonstrated the kind of leadership and insight that are required for the presidency — he instead flailed about. Calling for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox? Right there, in that act, we got a glimpse of why senators so often make bad presidential candidates. From time immemorial, senators haughtily acts as though the dismissal of executive branch officials is a form of policymaking when it is almost always the opposite — an act of scapegoating.

As SEC chairman, Cox only possesses the regulatory authority granted to him by acts of Congress, i.e., by senators like McCain. Cox did not and does not possess the regulatory authority to halt the creation of the poorly collateralized securities that nearly brought Wall Street down last week. But the naming and pursuit of villains was McCain’s gut instinct last week, as he seemed to attempt to don Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle as the crusader against “malefactors of great wealth.”

After a decent speech on the matter on Friday, McCain seemed to regain his footing a bit. But on Sunday night he took a gobstopping turn back into the intellectual muck. Speaking on “60 Minutes,” he seemed to suggest that he would like to consider Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, to succeed Cox.

Andrew Cuomo!? I realize that McCain doesn't have the time to read up on everything that crops up about everyone, but doesn't anyone around him know anything about Cuomo? Someone on his team needs to go read this article from the Village Voice, no conservative mouthpiece, about what a pivotal role Cuomo has played in this mess.

There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

McCain seems like he's flailing around now. His diatribes about corruption and attacks on Chris Cox remind us of his sanctimonious diatribes about all the evils of money in election campaigns. He is sure that there is corruption out there but can't really point to what he's referring to.

He has a perfect argument to make about his role in trying to rein in Fannie and Freddie and how the Democrats were the ones who scoffed that there was a problem and blocked him.

It's pretty bad when I'm hoping that my candidate will just shut up and stop reminding me of all the reasons I had such doubts about him in the first place.

UPDATE: Stephen Hays has more on what a stupid blunder it was for McCain to start touting Andrew Cuomo.

This may be the dumbest single thing John McCain has said during the course of the 2008 presidential campaign and suggests he simply wasn't paying attention during Cuomo's corrupt tenure at HUD. Cuomo's tenure was marked by shady business associations, the deeply politicized use of taxpayer dollars that John McCain criticizes in his stump speech, and, worst of all, the kinds of high-risk loans schemes that have characterized the current housing and economic crisis.

Cuomo, who announced his run to be governor of New York just nine days after he left HUD, used the federal housing bureaucracy as his de facto campaign headquarters. HUD pumped out slick, high-dollar brochures that touted his "accomplishments" in areas that had nothing to do with housing. The photos for some of those taxpayer-financed brochures ended up on Cuomo's campaign website.