So here's an interesting wrinkle in that story I wrote a few weeks back about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's Emerging Markets Homeowner's Initative, which encouraged firms to offer sharia-compliant loans to promote minority homeownership. Conservative commentator Dick Morris apparently wrote about the issue in his 2010 book (even encouraging readers to express their displeasure with Pawlenty directly), and he takes another shot at Pawlenty in a recent column:
Then Charles, his view obscured by Washington DC's buildings, says Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, and Tim Pawlenty are first tier candidates. Barbour can’t run if Huckabee does. He won’t beat him in a single southern state. In the rest of the nation, his lobbyist record kills him. Pawlenty would be good but, as Governor of Minnesota, his Housing Finance Agency set up a Shariah compliant lending fund to enable Muslims to buy homes without paying interest (the state paid it and they paid the state back through a lease-purchase deal). After eighteen months, he ended the program. He claims he didn’t know about it. Didn’t know? There were protests at every Agency meeting. Eileen and I wrote about it in Catastrophe which sold 300,000 copies! If he didn’t know, he’s a bad Governor. If he knew, he’d be a bad president.
Pawlenty claims he actually shut the program down as soon as he learned about it. Now, it bears repeating that there was nothing sinister about the program, which would have merely resulted in more observant Muslims becoming homeowners. Morris' account of widespread protests though, doesn't seem to jibe with the recollection of the local partner, the African Development Center, which seemed completely unaware of the controversy until after Pawlenty tried to distance himself from the program:
ADC had no idea that the NMMP was ordered to be shut down by Governor Pawlenty because ADC never worked directly with his office, as this product was a private –public partnership assisted by Minnesota Housing. Regrettably, ADC was not invited or included in any discussions or decisions by the former Governor or his administration regarding the direction given to Minnesota Housing to halt this product.
Worth remembering is that Minnesota Public Radio confirmed that the program was shut down because of lack of interest, not because it was controversial. The idea that this would be a disqualifying factor for a potential GOP nominee is ridiculous, but you run for president with the base you have.
