This Hurts, Explaining McCain's Housing Plan

Amanda Carpenter | October 09, 2008 3:56 PM

Townhall readers know I am not a fan of McCain's new housing plan, but I ended up having to defend it a bit on MSNBC today because Barack Obama's mischaracterizing it so badly on the campaign trail.

Yes, it hurts.

Obama keeps saying McCain is handing over a new $300 billion to the banks, screwing the taxpayer etc. According to the McCain plan, McCain isn't asking for any "new" money. That $300 billion is taken as a carve-out of the $700 billion already passed by Congress--WHICH OBAMA VOTED FOR--and will be used to buy failed mortgages and negotiate the rates at market value.

Obama already signed off on this money. Not new. He already screwed the taxpayer.

If he wants to take issue with the spending, he shouldn't have voted for it. I personally wish neither of them had voted for this thing, but they did. It's just really dishonest of Obama to try to act like the fiscal conservative who cares so much about this money after he voted for all this spending.

There's lots of things to quibble with about McCain's plan as I have done here at Townhall. But Obama has never had any problem with the redistribution of wealth until McCain proposed this plan. Quite frankly, I'm surprised Obama didn't propose something along these lines himself. And besides, shouldn't Obama be happy McCain wants this money to be directly transferred to homeowners and not the Wall Street fact cats?

Again, I really detest the notion of any of this income redistribution but it is helpful when people at least know what the other is really talking about. Then I could proceed to actually talk about the things I think are important (the problems with this plan) rather than having to make sure everyone understands what the dang thing is.

At the very least, McCain presented a plan. What's Obama got? Talking points. "McCain is more of the same." Now Obama's criticizing spending he's already signed off on. It doesn't make any sense on his part.