The crisis I care about is on Main Street
October 1, 2008 – 6:29 amMaybe it’s the confidence of a man who's expected to win a seventh term in Congress handily. Maybe it’s the definition of leadership.
But U.S. Rep. Allen Boyd of Monticello, representing Florida’s 2nd District, expects to vote in favor of what he calls a financially responsible plan to stabilize the financial markets, protect homeownership and bring sense to the mortgage banking crisis.
Others call it a bailout of Wall Street bigwigs who guessed wrong and took obscene profits. Based on phone calls and other communications to his offices, his constituents oppose it by a margin of 3- or 4-to-1.
The public, he says, doesn’t really understand what’s happened yet.
“It’s not their fault,” he said in an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat editorial board this week. Boyd voted in favor of a bipartisan plan that unexpectedly failed a House vote this week.
We posted two videos of the interview on Tallahassee.com. One is edited to about 4 minutes; the other is the full interview, which is nearly an hour long. It was a good discussion, back and forth.
Congress is just wrapping its collective mind around the sudden financial crisis.
But that’s where leadership comes in; it’s why we need a new president, he says, one with the credibility and skills to lead at times like this. That’s lacking now, he says.
I’ll admit to being one who doesn’t fully understand the crisis. I know the causes, I know the potential fixes, but something doesn’t feel right. We’ve been taught to believe that a sudden financial collapse, such as the Great Depression, just couldn’t happen again – too many checks and balances in the system.
Yet we heard from scared people – especially older folks – who were running down to the bank, ignoring the federal insurance protections on their accounts, to take out cash.
While Congress fiddled, the financial markets burned – dropping more than 700 points in one day this week, the largest single-day point drop in history. The next day, we were back up.
But all of a sudden it was 1929 all over again.
And, as Boyd says in our video, Congress watched from the floor as the Dow dropped, seemingly more and more the longer the House went.
Maybe credit was too loose. Maybe people took chances they shouldn’t have. Maybe a lot of things.
But one thing is clear: This isn’t about Wall Street; it's about the streets across Tallahassee and the Big Bend and Florida and beyond. It’s about a further slowing of the economy, protecting jobs and pensions.
Those are things worth protecting by leaders who are willing to do what’s best for the public and not for their own chances of re-election.
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