WHAT COMES AFTER EMANUEL?
White House insiders say that the “vibe” inside the Obama
Administration is that “Rahm is running” for mayor of Chicago, but
that it is perhaps the least surprising turn of events in what is
expected to be “a house cleaning” after the midterm
elections.”Maybe it’s just me,” says a longtime Obama aide, “but I
think a lot of us feel that the President was ill-served by White
House staff that did not have the pre-existing relationship or ties
to him, and the result is the mess we’re in right now. The
President needs more of what I’d call the ‘true believers’ close to
him and a lot of us think that is what is going to happen after
November.”
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel
has not announced whether he will in fact run for mayor of Chicago,
though it appears he is undertaking the kind of pre-campaign
research and preparation to do just that. President Obama has
already endorsed such a run.
Emanuel has been the No. 1 example of a “non-Obama
insider” for many Democrats who have complained about the mounting
failures of the Administration. Before signing on with Obama,
Emanuel was a strong Hillary Clinton supporter.
“Obama hired [Emanuel], not because he trusted him, but because he
had more experience in the White House and in Washington than he,
or just about anyone else Obama associated himself with,
did.”
Emanuel, according to longtime associates, took the job,
in part, because he had his eye on long-term political strategy for
himself. As one of them puts it, “You had the bulk of Chicago’s
liberal establishment tied into Obama, some of whom Emanuel did not
have strong relationships with. These past two years have been
great for him to solidify his political and fundraising connections
back home for whatever it is he decides to do.”
Much of the D.C. parlor talk now is who will replace him.
The current favorite — mostly among journalists who use him as a
source — is Phil Schiliro, the
current Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. Several
weeks ago, when, regardless of the Chicago mayoral run, it was
assumed that Emanuel would be jumping ship, Schiliro was one of
several names in play. But with Republicans poised to gain ground
on Capitol Hill, and with the antagonistic approach to legislation
the Obama Administration has taken, White House insiders now think
Schiliro would not be the right man to reach out to Republicans on
deal-making.
What some Obama White House aides hope happens is that
Obama reaches down to some of his longer-standing political
acquaintances and draws them back into the “inner circle.” “If we
only have two years left, we need true believers who are going to
work hard to put the country on the path that we want the country
to be on, and do it in a way that make it very difficult for the
next administration to roll back. That is the political calculation
we want to see in the President.”
MORTGAGE BUSTERS
Leftist groups with ties to George Soros and
other big-money donors of the Obama Administration are pressuring
Democrat House committee aides and legislators to demand
Congressional hearings on the reverse mortgage industry. Those
companies’ profiles have been raised over the past six months, in
part, due to extensive cable TV and radio advertising. In fact,
over the summer, Mother Jones and the left-wing George
Soros-funded Media Matters launched attacks against American
Advisors Group (AAG), a firm that markets reverse
mortgages.
A reverse mortgage is a type of home loan marketed to
seniors that allows them to draw cash on the home equity that built
up over years of mortgage payments they have paid. The lender
typically requires no repayment until the homeowner no longer uses
the home. In fact, the Obama Administration’s Department of Housing
and Urban Development offers a reverse mortgage program similar to
those advertising in today’s tough economic climate.
The timing of the attacks and the attempt to use the
summer media reports to push for congressional activity is not a
coincidence. “The story gets planted on a website, and then Media
Matters picks it up and tries to make a mountain out of a molehill,
and then groups like Free Press or the Center for American Progress
or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington (CREW) jump in and push the story
into the more political arena,” says a former MoveOn.org
staffer.n>
According to political consultants who have in the past
coordinated with the leftist and secretive Democracy Alliance as
well as a number of other leftist donor organizations, such as the
New Progressive Coalition, the Progressive Donor Network, the Arca
Foundation and Proteus Fund, many of them with ties to George
Soros, among others, the attacks on AAG, as well as other companies
that advertise on Fox News and conservative talk radio, are largely
being coordinated by the political operations with ties to
left-wing media.
“There isn’t a single progressive publication, think tank
or blogger who wouldn’t kill to tap into the connections and money
that is sitting out there from the Alliance or any of those
groups,” says a former political consultant who is now a member of
the Obama Administration. “If Soros or one of the Alliance members
wants something done — or someone thinks it will help them connect
to the Alliance or one of the donors — it usually gets
done.”
In this case, the attacks on the reverse-mortgage
industry, and AAG in particular, appear to be for the pleasure of
Herbert and Marion Sandler, billionaires and the
former co-CEOs of Golden West Financial. Until 2006, Golden West
operated as the World Savings Bank, which was one of the innovators
of the so-called “pick a pay” mortgage. Under the terms of such a
loan, homeowners were allowed to pay less than the amount of
interest being charged, sometimes for as long as a decade. The
Sandlers never had to deal with the fallout of such loans. They
sold their institution to Wachovia in 2006 for billions, and
the
rest is history.
The Sandlers have used their profits to join forces with
leftist Soros in the Alliance, among other entities, which help
fund just about every left-wing entity with ties to the Obama
Administration, including MoveOn.org, Free Press, and Media
Matters. Marion Sandler has served on the board of the Center for
American Progress, and the Sandlers recently donated $10 million
for the creation of ProPublica, a nonprofit, left-leaning
investigative journalism operation founded by former employees of
the Wall Street Journal.
In the case of AAG, some of the attacks and research
against the business appears to have been generated by individuals
with ties to the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) and its
for-profit network of affiliated credit unions and lending funds
known as the “Center for Community Self-Help.” Self-Help pushes
subprime lending programs, while the Center for Responsible Lending
attacks other for-profit loan programs. Its website
has linked to a number of article warning consumers against
reverse mortgages, claiming that industry is the next subprime
disaster.
Besides the Sandlers, another major private donor for CRL
is notorious hedge-fund operator John
Paulson, whose company
paid Goldman Sachs to structure a transaction in which Paulson
& Co. took short positions against mortgage securities that
Paulson’s firm thought might be ripe for collapse, but which were
sold to Goldman clients as longer-term investment vehicles. Paulson
won big; Goldman clients lost. Paulson gave CRL $15 million three
years ago, and according to an ethics complaint filed against CRL,
some of those funds were used by CRL to lobby Congress. Paulson was
not a part of the ethics complaint.
Back in 2007, CRL lobbied Congress for legislation
blocking such loan programs as short-term “payday” loans, has
lobbied for and supported the Obama Administration’s financial
services reform agenda, and sources say, there is a move afoot to
fund a campaign that would encourage Congress to look at the
reverse-mortgage industry. Perhaps most notoriously, CRL and its
for-profit partner have had extensive ties to Association of
Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), to promote their
home-mortgage programs.
Now, beyond the attacks on reverse mortgages, the
Soros-Sandler-backed groups also plan to coordinate a campaign
against renewal of the Bush tax cuts, and in support of greater
stimulus spending by the federal government.
