Obama’s test: a nation of Santellis - Andie Coller - POLITICO.com

Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, also a Democrat, agrees: “This is not directed at those who didn’t play by the rules,” she says. “It’s directed at trying to fix a system so everyone can stay in their homes and so that everyone’s community is not negatively affected by the foreclosures that are popping up all over that neighborhood.”

Still, notes Braley, “I just don’t think that that message has been said often enough and loud enough that people are starting to accept it as a justification of this plan.”

Braley says he expects the president to “go into more detail about how average homeowners are going to benefit on this” during his speech to a joint session of Congress.

Like Braley, Alyssa Katz, author of “Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us,” a book due out in June about the making of the mortgage crisis, says she does not believe the message has come through clearly enough yet — and that the administration needs to do more to make sure it does.

“Ultimately, yes, it’s about homeowners, but it’s about the stability of the financial markets,” she says. “We have to give up this illusion that it’s about you and me. We have to accept, sort of blindly, the notion that we have to do this for the sake of the nation. Whether you’re lucky and get aid or you already lost your home and you’re screwed, we’re all in this together.”

What a farrago of socialist, nanny-state nonsense. The housing market - and the economy as a whole - will “stabilize” when it reaches a clearing point such that bubble prices have disappeared and bad debt has been liquidated. At that point, housing prices will be low enough that considerably more folks will be able to buy, and they will be stronger buyers. And the financial bubble built on the housing house of cards will be cleared at the same time, and sound loans can then be made on homes with values more in tune with reality.

You don’t get there by saying “We have to keep every dumbass who bought a home they couldn’t afford in that home,” especially when it is the non-dumbasses who have to fork over in order to pay for that.

I knew the Democrats and Obama would destroy their own victory. I just didn’t think they’d get started so early.

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