Franklin Roosevelt is universally considered by historians as the greatest president of the 20th century. He won four landslide victories, saved a nation from depression, and won a world war. But hilariously, if you work for Forbes, you might think it a real black mark against Barack Obama that he “steals a page from FDR”.

Roosevelt, it seems, was a capricious tyrant whose “minions” once considered retroactively prosecuting tax fraud. Similarly, Barack Obama has proposed passing laws to regulate the subprime mortgage industry to protect borrowers from predatory lenders.

Obama, unsurpirsingly, didn’t propose retroactively prosecuting anything, and it’s hard to see how any but the most deliberate misreading of his speech could suggest that he did. He is, after all, a professor of constitutional law. But facts have never stopped conservatives from bitching about the New Deal before. In the senator’s own words:

I have also introduced a bill in the US Senate called the Stop Fraud Act that would treat those who commit mortgage fraud as the criminals they are.

Owning a home represents a big part of the American dream and all Americans - no matter what their income level - should have the power to reach for that dream. But that is not going to happen until we stop the unlicensed, unregulated, fly-by-night mortgage brokers who are hoodwinking low-income borrowers into taking on loans they cannot afford.

If we are serious about stopping this crisis and preventing much larger turmoil in US housing markets, Washington needs to stop acting like an industry advocate and start acting like a public advocate.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 4:16 pm, 29 August 2007 and filed under 2008 Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.