Back Talk

Washington Democrat insider Jim Johnson, the man Obama chose to lead the search for his running mate, didn’t take long to come under fire for a history of questionable – at the very least – ethics. A Wall Street Journal article unveiled the fact that Johnson received loans worth $1.7 million from the sub-prime lender, Countrywide Home Loans, through a special arrangement for special terms from a company embroiled in the nation's mortgage crisis. Johnson, the Fannie Mae head from 1991 through 1998, received more than $7 million in real estate loans from a program open only to friends of Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial Corporation.
Good lawyer/politician that he is, Obama quickly reacted to the newest challenge with a little tap dance and word parsing rationalizations to attempt to squeeze by, but in a couple of days he did the politician polka and threw Johnson to the wolves just as he did to 20-year friend and minister Reverend Wright and even his white grandmother whom he called a bigot.
He made quick work of his foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, and encouraged her to leave his campaign almost immediately after she endangered some votes by calling Hillary Rodham Clinton "a monster."
Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s economic advisor, committed the political no-no of truth-telling when he told the Canadian government that his boss was just playing politics (translation: he lied) when he told an Ohio audience that he is against NAFTA; that he actually favored NAFTA. And so it goes.