Over the past few days, Obama, Hillary, and McCain have all given speeches addressing the housing crisis. McCain gave much the talk you would expect -- short, obfuscatory, and including the increasingly annoying tagline "Let's start with some straight talk." The guy's speeches have begun to exhibit a pro-wrestling rhythm. "Straight talk" is used in much the same way as "Cause Stone Cold said so!" It's also got some weird, let-them-eat-cake moments. At one point, McCain enthuses, "of [America's] 80 million homeowners, only 55 million have a mortgage at all, and 51 million are doing what is necessary -- working a second job, skipping a vacation, and managing their budgets -- to make their payments on time." Three cheers for that! And parts are simply self-contradictory. "Any assistance for borrowers should be focused solely on homeowners," McCain says, "not people who bought houses for speculative purposes, to rent or as second homes. Any assistance must be temporary and must not reward people who were irresponsible at the expense of those who weren't." No one, as the New York Times has pointed out, has ever suggested a bail-out for speculators. But in the conservative telling, the homeowners who need assistance are definitionally irresponsible, in that they took out loans they couldn't pay back. So we're going to help homeowners but not the ones who can't afford payments? That seems bright.
