Dana was able to pose a couple sharp questions to Bill Clinton at a presser before the start of the Clinton Global Initiative. She asked if he regretted any of the deregulation that occurred under his watch. Not really, he said. he wished he'd pushed harder to regulate derivative and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but he believes that signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall -- which broke down the wall between commercial and investment banks -- has proven a boon. "In the case of the current crisis, I believe the bill I signed allowed Bank of America to take over Merrill Lynch," he said. He also said that Democrats need to pass a bailout quickly, but then "lobby" in the coming weeks for a package of measures to help ordinary Americans keep their homes and protect their investments. That seems precisely backwards to me: If the Bush administration would like to strike some kind of deal wherein quick passage of the bailout comes with a solemn promise to sign a Democratic economic relief package, that's one thing. But to pass the bailout bill and then try and engage a fight over a stimulus package is nuts. The bailout bill is your leverage. Without it, Bush will veto any serious stimulus package, just as he did when he refused to allow unemployment benefits and food stamps into the first stimulus package, and just as he did when he rejected a bipartisan effort to expand S-CHIP. Bush is perfectly content at 19 percent in the polls. That is the central fact of legislative politics at this moment in time. If you want his signature on a major initiative of just the sort he's continually opposed, you're going to need to do something stronger than "lobby."
