Hillary : "I will hold my nose and support the plan"

One may really wonder what is happening to Hillary Clinton these days...

She spent her weekend in Michigan criticizing the bailout plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson. And today, she announced that she would finally vote for it !

She was addressing Long Island business leaders at the Long Island Association breakfast in Woodbury. She told them that the newest version of the Wall Street bailout package worked out over the weekend has "improved dramatically" over the original version proposed by the administration last week, and she plans to "hold my nose" and support it.

But she also made it clear that  the rescue effort will be incomplete, until the government comes up with a more robust rescue for troubled home mortgages at the root of the financial crisis.

So Clinton said she plans to introduce legislation to create an entity like the Home Owners Loan Corporation, a New Deal agency created in 1933 to refinance homes to prevent foreclosure (see yesterday's post).

"Unless we stabilize the home market we are not going to have the comprehensive solution we need," she said.

After Clinton's address, fear swept across the financial markets Monday, sending the Dow Jones industrials down as much as 705 points, after the government's bailout package failed the House.

As the vote was shown on TV, stocks plunged and investors fled to the safety of the credit markets, worrying that the financial system would keep sinking under the weight of failed mortgage debt.

To conclude, if Hillary Clinton really votes in favour of the plan on Wednesday, she may well be blamed for lacking coherence in her choices, and may also be accused of being an accomplice of a very unpopular president, who will soon leave, and who has decided to make his fellow-citizens pay before he leaves. The Americans will have to pay to compensate for the losses of a financial market which has made big profits, and to correct the mistakes made by men who will leave their bankrupt companies with rewards amounting to millions of dollars (as the former head of Washington Mutual).


As far as Barack Obama is concerned, he has always said he supports the plan. But it is not surprising, because, he does not care about the implications of such a plan.
For him, no matter what will happen to his fellow-Americans. Whatever the scandal, whatever the recourse to public money, he does not care.
For him, one thing is more important than everything : he wants to enter the White House, whatever happens next...

That is why we would like Hillary to distance herself from all those Democrats who seem to have gone out of their minds for months now, and to assume her independence from a political party which seems to have no idea,  no project, no vision, and which is interested in one thing only : coming back to power at any cost...