Those who say the Obama administration had no scandals are wrong. Mass foreclosures were policy. Theft of wealth was a horrible scandal. @ryanlcooper @MattBruenig crunch the numbers. peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/12/07/des…
In 2006 and 2008 I worked a primary race between @DonnaFEdwards and Al Wynn in a black suburban area. Foreclosures were a massive issue, before they hit white areas.
Obama didn't cause the financial crisis, at all. But Obama *responded* to the financial crisis by choosing a foreclosure wave instead of recapitalizing the banks.
Obama's policies had other really awful consequences, like destroying independent black owned businesses and banks. washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march…
This was policy. Obama actually rejected a compromise between Barney Frank and George W. Bush to write down mortgage debt in favor of a foreclosure wave. nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/barney…
The most maddening part is that Obama/Geithner/Summers were never honest that this was policy. It was all behind closed doors, so we could never debate it.
Black turnout has been dropping even though the GOP is even more explicitly a white supremacist party. Why? Perhaps this catastrophic policy framework and the lack of acknowledgement of it? No matter who is in charge things seem to get worse. But no, they got worse bc of policy.
The hold that Clinton/Obama had on the party is loosening. Most won't ever believe Obama's policies were malevolent/deceptive. But they increasingly believe those policies failed.
Yup, I thought about mentioning this. While AG he also bought a million dollar apartment 900 feet from the law firm. This was deeply unethical, and probably illegal.
Nope, bad policy is scandal. And by the way, amnesty for Wall Street CEOs and foreclosures for everyone else is a massive undermining of democratic norms. Rule of law eviscerated under Obama, not Trump.
There may have been, but the point is Obama never honestly said "I'm choosing a foreclosure crisis let's debate that". He lied about this main axis of policy.
Yup, a lot of Obama ex-officials are coming around. There's still a nasty core funded by Silicon Valley who are fighting a rearguard action to retain control of the Democrats.
We don't know, because there isn't even a unified database of how many there were (even though there's a mandate to have one in Dodd-Frank).
It wasn't the Republicans who tried to appoint Larry Summers to be Fed Chair. And it was the Democrats who blocked Obama from doing this.
The foreclosure policy was part of a broad vision of political economy which was frankly not that different from Trump's. I wrote a review of @eisingerj's Chickenshit Club book on white collar crime. thebaffler.com/salvos/lords-o…
The other scandal is Obama's post-Presidential paid speeches. To Wall Street. In China. France. Etc. It's just legal bribery and it's unethical. Historian Douglas Brinkley doesn't appear to notice. 
I reject your premise. But even accepting it, America elected Obama to change things, he ended up proving that democracy is weak. That is far worse than a personal scandal. Obama promised hope, he delivered hopelessness.
FDR: "Dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments, but out of weak and helpless ones. If by democratic methods people get a gov't strong enough to protect them from fear and starvation, their democracy succeeds; but if they do not, they grow impatient."
The rise of authoritarianism was not a surprise to a lot of us working on the foreclosure crisis. People turn away from democracy when leaders elected democratically deliver injustice. It is not important if those leaders meant well.
America has traditionally delivered citizenship through homeownership. Perhaps that's a bad way to do it, but it is the way we've done it. If you get rid of homeownership you have to replace the political bargain with something else. Bush/Obama didn't. ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewconten…
Harry Truman: "Morality in government means more than a mere absence of wrongdoing. It means a government that is fair to all. I think it is just as immoral for the Congress to enact special tax favors into law as it is for a tax official to connive in a crooked tax return."
