I think it was deliberate.
With friends in high media places Democrats have grown accustomed to creating a reality to fit their political ambitions. To find examples we need only peruse comments of the Democratic leadership over the past several years regarding the war in Iraq. The war was lost, according to Democrats, and the mainstream press piled on too, publishing every negative story about the war in Iraq but somehow ignoring signs of success. And there were plenty. The result should come as no surprise. A majority of Americans believed until very recently that the war was lost.
Another black mark against Republican stewardship. George Bush, the incompetent, led us to defeat in Iraq at the hands of al Qaeda. Unfortunately for Democrats, it's al Qaeda who is suffering a catastrophic defeat in Iraq, and even their media allies can't avoid it any more. This does not bode well for Barack Obama, whose campaign strategy is based on his premise that America is losing, and his promise to mitigate the loss with a pullout -- regardless of the conditions on the ground. But now Americans are slowly coming around to the reality that Iraq is going to be a viable democracy. While Nouri al Maliki takes on the Shi'ite militias, Barack Obama is busily refining his position on Iraq so as not to be recognized as the threat to Iraq's future that he and the Democrats have always been.
As a campaign issue for Democrats, Iraq is coming up a loser. Time for a new tactic. It's the economy, stupid. Enter Chuck Schumer to help out by pushing a faltering IndyMac Bank over the edge in the midst of a credit crunch. It was easy. He just leaked a letter he had written to bank regulators who were looking into its troubles.
He was, he says, just doing his job in telling regulators that the bank "could face a collapse," a prophecy that quickly proved to be self-fulfilling. "It's what legislators are supposed to do," the New York Democrat told the Journal. Depositors who spent Monday trying to recover some of their money might beg to differ.
The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), whose job it actually was to regulate IndyMac, took a different view. "The immediate cause of the closing," the OTS wrote in a press release, "was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York." The OTS added: "In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts."
There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the Senator knew exactly what he was doing. Just as anti-war Democrats planned that self-fulfilling prophecies of defeat in Iraq would carry them to electoral victory, Schumer intended to ratchet up the credit crunch with a self fulfilling prophecy of his own. Democratic candidates might then have a campaign issue that they could blame on Bush Administration mismanagement, now that Iraq is becoming a Democratic liability.
They'll need a new issue. By the time October rolls around, it's likely that conditions in Iraq will have made obvious just how duplicitous and wrong the Democratic leadership has been. It's not for nothing that public approval of congress is lower than at any time in history. They might try blaming high gas prices on the Republicans but their continuing refusal to permit any boost in U.S. domestic oil production will make that an unlikely proposition. What's left?
No doubt Senator Charles Schumer thought he had an issue Democrats could take to the bank.
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