Buckeye RINO

Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer has a sub-prime lender story written by Mark Gillispie detailing just how widespread mortgage fraud is in this country. They don’t mention any Wall Street banks or financial institutions that are exempt from having played a role in the mortgage fraud perpetrated by sub-prime lenders. In fact, in describing the scope of the mortgage fraud industry, the applicable term was “systemic.”

Systemic. That’s downright scary.

Why scary? The Plain Dealer cites the words of Anthony Accetta, a founder of a private investigation firm that specializes in finance, who is also a former federal prosecutor with a history of prosecuting mortgage fraud during the 1970’s, and who worked as a private attorney on behalf of investment banks in the years between his work as a federal prosecutor and his work in private investigations.

“This is a national catastrophe, and the perpetrators [on Wall Street] are not being prosecuted,” Accetta said. “It’s one of the easiest cases to prove because there are plenty of witnesses and plenty of evidence out there.”

So, why the failure to prosecute? Here’s the most chilling part:

Despite the FBI and SEC investigations, Accetta said he doesn’t think the U.S. Justice Department “has the stomach” to prosecute these companies, out of fear it would undermine confidence in those financial institutions and our capital structure.

“So you’re left with prosecuting individuals,” Accetta said. “This was systemic. It had nothing to do with this individual or that individual. There was no individual in any of the investment banks who could have stopped it even if they wanted to.”

Do you see why this is scary?

OUR CONFIDENCE IN THE ENTIRE CAPITAL STRUCTURE OF THE U.S. WOULD BE SHAKEN IF WE KNEW THE WHOLE TRUTH.

The Plain Dealer also put together this clever graphic to show how all the financial players fit together to perpetrate their particular aspect of mortgage fraud.

I noticed a puzzle piece that hadn’t been added in, and that’s the part about how companies write off losses from foreclosures when they file taxes with the IRS. Let me add some detail about my prior blog entry, “Sub-prime lender as tax evader.”

When the seller first bought the house (as a buyer), the seller went to a broker in Middleburg Heights who said it would be easy to get a loan at about 5.25%. The seller became furious when the loan that was offered was an Adjustable Rate Mortgage that in just three years would charge interest of over 13%. The seller demanded a fixed rate mortgage. The broker countered with a mortgage fixed at 7.5%. The seller accepted the mortgage offer, even though it was a far cry from the 5.25% the mortgage broker had cited at the outset. The original mortgage loan amount was $133,000.

The mortgage originator was Wilmington Financial, but almost immediately, Wilmington Financial sold the mortgage to JP Morgan Chase. Though JP Morgan Chase became owner of the loan, loan payments were processed by Lytton Loan Servicing. Lytton Loan Servicing claimed to be just a “middle man,” not the loan owner itself. After the seller experienced a precipitous drop in income and had difficulty making house payments, the seller declared bankruptcy, and JP Morgan Chase was the creditor who was owed the most. JP Morgan Chase also forged ahead with foreclosure proceedings. The seller listed the home for sale, and a buyer came forward to buy it. After negotiations between JP Morgan Chase and the buyer, a sale price was agreed upon at $129,000, which was just a few hundred dollars less than the principle still owed on the mortgage. Being that close, JP Morgan Chase graciously permitted that the mortgage would be shown as “paid-in-full,” and the culmination of foreclosure proceedings was averted. That was in 2006.

Fast forward to 2008. The seller is told by the IRS that thousands of dollars in taxes are owed dating back to 2006. The seller discovers that a 1099 form was submitted to the IRS imputing nearly $64,000 of income to the seller. This imputed income was represented as the amount charged off in a short-sale real estate transaction. The seller was never sent a copy of this 1099.

$64,000 was written off in the wake of a sale of $129,000, when the original mortgage amount was $133,000? Does that even pass the smell test?

JP Morgan Chase, the mortgage owner prior to the real estate transaction, was not the company that submitted the 1099 form. It was Lytton Loan Servicing. A quick check of the seller’s credit report also shows an EXISTING mortgage as delinquent, with the creditor listed as Lytton Loan Servicing, who was always represented as nothing more than a “middle man” that processed the payments on behalf of JP Morgan Chase.

The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007 is now in effect to help sellers escape from getting smacked with 1099 income from charged-off amounts incurred in a short-sale of their home. Nevertheless, I still think cheating the IRS by vastly inflating write-offs, and playing shell games among companies (and, prior to the Act, a quick submission to the IRS of the 1099 with a failure to submit a 1099 to the seller in order to delay the onset of whistle-blowing), is an overlooked aspect of the sub-prime mortgage fraud crisis.

In addition to the FBI and the SEC, the IRS might want to do some investigating of its own.

Someone I know very well sold a house as it was being foreclosed upon. The sale price of the house nearly equaled what was owed on the mortgage. The predatory mortgage lender who’d been charging sub-prime rates agreed to accept the sale price as payment-in-full for the mortgage. That was 2006.

Now it’s 2008. The seller of the home gets a notice from the IRS asking for several thousand dollars more in taxes for calendar year 2006. The seller only had W-2 income that year, so had filed form 1040-EZ. The IRS says that the seller’s income didn’t match the records on file. What the IRS had on file is a form W-2 . . . AND . . . a form 1099.

The seller never received any 1099. No 1099 ever arrived in the mail. The seller never had any knowledge of the 1099.

The 1099 was sent to the IRS from the mortgage lender. The mortgage lender is telling the IRS that they charged off HALF THE BALANCE OF THE MORTGAGE!!!!!

When creditors charge off bad debts, they are permitted to write it off on their taxes and report the amount written off as income imputed to the debtor. But, in this case, when the sale on the house closed, the mortgage lender acknowledged that the debt was paid in full, and the lender was not taking a loss.

Had the seller received a 1099 in January of 2007, the seller would have taken immediate action to dispute the information appearing on the 1099, and probably could have resolved the issue without needing to consult a lawyer or accountant. The seller is undertaking the dispute now, but is much more inconvenienced as the seller has to dig through papers to gather relevant documentation, and will most likely need to consult with both a lawyer and an accountant, costing perhaps hundreds, but it’s cheaper than paying the thousands that the IRS wants.

What would you think if half the amount of your mortgage were added to your income? Think about the tax bracket it would put you in, and then ask yourself, would you be able to cough up the taxes owed? In the seller’s case, even with the tax bill broken down into monthly installments that the IRS will permit, the 2006 tax payments would become the largest single expenditure in the seller’s monthly budget.

The IRS has notified state and local tax agencies of the income discrepancy, so guess who else will come calling with their hands out?

After looking through the seller’s documentation, I have to wonder, how widespread is this practice of creditors claiming losses that don’t exist simply to reduce their own tax burden?

And while these greedy sub-prime lenders have contributed to bursting the bubble of housing markets which is leaving the nation’s economy teetering on the edge of collapse, this particular sub-prime lender is also back-stabbing the nation by evading payment of their full share of taxes by fraudulently imputing the income to someone else. And even if the debtors pay the tax that’s been deceitfully shifted on to them, the IRS is still getting less, because the lender is probably in a much higher tax bracket than the debtors.

That whole industry sector of predatory lenders are now quaking in fear that legislation being contemplated now will alter their business practices so much that it may not be lucrative enough to keep the doors to their businesses open. My response is: You had your day in the sun. Count your blessings that you were able to get away with what you got away with. Now that it’s raining on your parade, I’m not shedding any tears.

Rev. Wright might say: Your chickens are coming home to roost.

****The sequel with more details****

DJW, the Buckeye RINO, offers analysis of which persons can help McCain gain electoral traction as VP candidates, and which ones won’t.

It has to be someone within the party. Lieberman won’t do.

McCain has already indicated that it won’t be a pro-choice candidate. And that’s wise.

Forget choosing Ohioans. I’ve heard Rob Portman and John Kasich mentioned as those possibly on the list. Neither will help him get elected. For both men, they are obscure on a national level. Portman could be too easily linked to Bush, and Obama has already replaced McCain’s first name, John, with a new first name, Bush. You’ll be hearing a lot about Obama’s opponent, Bush McCain, heading into the November elections. Few who served in the Bush Administration will be able to show enough distance from Bush to avoid making the marriage of the Bush name to the McCain name worse. Furthermore, it is doubtful that even naming an Ohioan will make any difference in carrying Ohio. Ohio voters are distrustful of current and past Republican leadership. They are eager for a Republican who is an ethics crusader. John McCain would do well to highlight his ethics crusade every time he makes a campaign stop here. Perhaps the only Republican Ohioan that can help pull off an election is Mary Taylor, as many see her as eager to do the right thing. But it wouldn’t be possible to make a case that Mary Taylor is ready to be a heartbeat away from being U.S. President. No Ohioans.

The only two former members of the Bush Administration that have any popularity at all that can distance themselves far enough from Bush are Christie Todd Whitman and Colin Powell. Whitman would be a choice consistent with McCain’s platform on the environment. Colin Powell is very popular. A current cabinet member that’s very popular, though she can’t distance herself from Bush, is Condoleeza Rice. From a popularity standpoint, Powell and Rice could help win as VP candidates, but if McCain is serious about a VP who isn’t pro-choice, that erases Whitman, Powell, and Rice. Rice appears at first glance to be the most conservative among the three on the abortion issue, but only Whitman has had a thorough vetting on the issue, so that comparison might not be valid. Nobody who served with Bush.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, for obvious reasons, cannot distance himself from Bush.

Senators and Representatives won’t work unless they have prior successful executive branch experience they can point to. There’ve already been criticisms that Americans have a poor choice for President with just legislators in the mix. The only exception I can think of that could have helped McCain is former U.S. Senator from Tennessee Fred Thompson. Thompson is an excellent communicator, Tennessee will be in play in the election, Thompson is not just popular, nationally, but is definitely popular in the South, where McCain needs to make sure his base is at fever pitch on his behalf in the fall, and Thompson also has a strong appeal to conservatives. Fred Thompson does not want the job and will not accept the job.

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty does not have national appeal, lives in a state likely to be in the Democrat camp, anyway, and is not really viewed as conservative enough to energize the base for McCain.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford represents a state considered far from the mainstream, and he, himself, while acceptable to conservatives, is also perceived to be too far from mainstream America. It would have helped his chances if South Carolina had irrevocably disassociated itself from the Confederate flag many years ago, yet the flag is still flying.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist endorsed McCain before McCain won Florida. Though Crist is popular in Florida, and though he is viewed as conservative, he does not embody a McCain who has unified with the disaffected voters within the GOP. It would be helpful for McCain to choose someone who used to be on the other side of the rift. Plus, I’m going to make a bold prediction here, Florida will be in the GOP camp this November, even if the Democrats seat the full state delegation at their convention.  Crist will deliver Florida while remaining Governor, so he’s not needed as a VP.

Former HUD Secretary and Congressman Jack Kemp would be criticized for his age just as much as McCain, since he is older than McCain.

It needs to be someone prominent, someone conservative, someone from the other side of the rift, someone who can appeal to the mainstream, and someone who can energize Republican voters.

Prominent on the other side of the rift would include some former Presidential contenders from this year and prior years:

Alan Keyes–too far from the mainstream.

Steve Forbes–never energized voters

Ron Paul–without executive branch experience and not mainstream

Elizabeth Dole–might also be criticized about age, and is older than McCain

Lamar Alexander, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee–these are the three that can really help McCain.

Lamar Alexander is a former governor, is younger than McCain, has associated himself with populism via the plaid shirt (thus mainstream), will solidify the South for McCain, and will appeal to conservatives, so I think voters would be energized.  Downsides aren’t readily apparent, unless he’s portrayed as a Washington insider by virtue of his service in the U.S. Senate.

Mitt Romney, who I voted for in the primary, is a former governor, is younger than McCain, couldn’t have won Massachusetts without mainstream appeal, puts some Northern blue states in play, is definitely from the opposite side of the rift from McCain (so adding him to the ticket would signify that McCain is unifying the party), is perceived to know what he’s talking about on economic issues, energizes the base (dominated caucus states, probably would have been nominated if delegates were proportionally allocated, and is the only, repeat, the only, GOP candidate this year who had at least double digit support in EVERY primary contest before dropping out, and is the 2nd place finisher in the delegate count), is a Washington outsider, and adding him to the ticket would be consistent with McCain’s position of making change and cleaning house in Washington.  Romney would help solidify the ticket in the Intermountain West.  There are two downsides.  One is that there is apparently religious prejudice against Romney in the South, yet Romney was competitive (double-digit support) in every primary contest he participated in.  The other is that, in light of the fact that McCain has recently been making campaign appearances in African-American communities, perhaps thinking he may be able to attract disaffected black voters if Clinton steals the nomination, Romney, sadly, hasn’t made prominent efforts to reach out to African-Americans.  If Obama is the nominee, Romney could marginally help attract Latinos, though  McCain, himself, has more appeal to Latinos than Romney.  Romney should probably not be VP if Hillary Clinton is the nominee.

Mike Huckabee is a former governor, is younger than McCain, is a Washington outsider, energizes his own base (which is big in the South), is a great communicator to the point that he has some mainstream appeal which he adds to with his humor, was an opponent of McCain all the way up until the nomination was clinched (so adding him to the ticket would signify McCain’s ability to unify the party).  The downsides are that many in the North and West do not think of Huckabee as really being conservative (me, included), and some are turned off by how bold he is in putting his born-again Christianity on display.  He has reached out to African-Americans and can do so again if Hillary is nominated, and he can deliver the South, including Arkansas, if Hillary Clinton is the winner, and he can put a dent in her appeal to less affluent and less educated whites.  Huckabee doesn’t really put any blue states in play, though he does prevent red states being taken away, thus a close and polarizing election would be the result.  Huckabee wouldn’t be a strong choice if Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee, but would be a great choice if Hillary Clinton is the Democrat nominee.

No matter who the Democrat nominee is and no matter who the VP is, I think there will be a distinct gender gap in November’s Presidential election.

So there you have it:  Pick Mitt Romney if Obama is the nominee.  Pick Mike Huckabee if Hillary Clinton is the nominee.  Pick Lamar Alexander if choosing the VP before the Democrats have a nominee.

I hope John McCain considers this advice.

Dodging Bosnian sniper fire, Hillary Clinton managed to nearly split the vote with Obama in the Guam caucuses.  Oh, wait.  Hillary’s not in Bosnia right now.

Besides embellishing her past, she also pays attention to which way the wind is blowing when announcing her views on issues.  Of course, opinion polls vary over time.  Conveniently, Hillary’s opinions vary accordingly.  Opinions aren’t the same from one state to another.  Interestingly, Hillary’s opinion adapts for that, too, like suddenly becoming skeptical of NAFTA once the campaigns arrived in Ohio.  Hillary Clinton will say things people want to hear in a certain locale, knowing full well that she can’t deliver on it, because there’s no nationwide consensus, but when she doesn’t deliver, no matter.  Somebody else stood in the way, so it wasn’t her fault.

A gimmick like that caught my eye in the Associated Press report out of Guam.  You have to look at the very tail end of the article to see what I’m referencing.  The very last sentence reads:

“Hillary Clinton also has called for Guamanians to be able to vote in presidential elections.”

Say what?  Say that again!

How disingenuous.

The Constitution doesn’t allow Guam to select electors in a U.S. Presidential election unless Guam becomes a state.

Guam is not going to become a state.  Trust me on this one.

The only other way to allow Guam representation in the Electoral College is to amend the Constitution.

Fat chance.

Hillary probably doesn’t care one way or the other about whether Guam gets to choose Presidential electors.  She’s just saying it to say it, and she knows that any push she makes for it will go nowhere, but she can always shrug it off when it comes to naught.

Call it pandering. Call it a gimmick.  Whatever it is, it’s fake.

It turns out that caucus results in Guam are a microcosm of the national Democrat nomination race.  Just as the nationwide race is nearly split, Guam’s four pledged delegates are being split down the middle, two for Obama and two for Clinton (actually, 8 pledged delegates will go to the convention, four for Obama and four for Clinton, but they each get half of a vote).   On the national level, just as the superdelegates will play a huge role in deciding a nomination that the pledged delegates, alone, can’t decide, so it is with Guam, which has 5 superdelegates.  Notice that the superdelegates of Guam are able to overturn an election even if one candidate monopolized Guam’s pledged delegate count.  Sounds so very, very, very Democratic to me.  Not.

Today I listened to Sean Hannity’s radio program while he interviewed former GOP Massachusetts Governor and former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Mitt Romney was trying to weigh in on the news of Rev. Wright vis-a-vis Barack Obama.  Romney was trying to split hairs over what was religious and what was political.  He did say that religion shouldn’t enter in to the Obama candidacy equation.  OK, I’m on board with that.  He did say that we should take Obama at his word that he does not share the views of Rev. Wright.  Good, because that’s what I say, also.  So, if we take Obama at his word, why did Mitt Romney go ahead and discuss the comments of Rev. Wright?  Also, if religion shouldn’t enter the equation, why did Romney question why Obama attended the same church for 20 years?  I think Romney was trying to tiptoe carefully through the discussion, but I think he failed.  I think he skated on thin ice and fell through.  I don’t think he managed to split the hairs.  Of course, I’m clearly not in synch with Hannity on this issue, either.

Though he had suspended his campaign before Ohio voted in its primary, I cast my vote for Romney, anyway.  Can you tell I’m a little bit disappointed in Romney for not taking the high road on this?

Obama took action sooner than I thought he would.  I’m glad for that.  We should never have second-guessed Obama based on Wright and religion in the first place, since we, at the least, knew that Obama was not a brainwashed cult member, and we knew that Obama had no intention of establishing a theocracy.  I certainly don’t have expectations that churches or ministers will be politically correct.  Obama, at the outset, rejected anti-Semitism.  Obama, right off the bat, expressed a very different view of America than what Wright put forward.  Obama had every right to remain in that church, no matter what people might think of Wright.  That Obama was being judged because of Wright’s words just made no sense, when Obama’s words were different.  If there’s any evidence that someone was unduly influenced by Wright’s tirades against America, it’s Mrs. Obama.  Her not-so-glowing characterizations of America have much greater potential for attracting legitimate criticism because she speaks as an Obama surrogate, whereas, Wright never did.

Watching the pundits last night, I can see that a number of them are willing to finally put this in the rear-view mirror, and the majority of them are now drawing a line that separates Wright from Obama.

And while a few conservative pundits, like Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt, are just too stubborn to abandon a flawed argument, I think most conservative pundits are eager to move on to other topics.

Clinton operatives, however, are still trying to milk the anti-Wright sentiments for all they’re worth.  In particular, on Larry King, Lanny Davis, while conceding that Wright’s views are not Obama’s views, is still harping on what the whole episode reveals about Obama’s judgment.  That’s just ridiculous.  Obama said that Wright wasn’t vetted by his campaign.  Before now, I didn’t know the campaign of any candidate, anywhere in the United States, was expected to vet the pastors of the candidates to make sure they were politically correct.  If we did, Billy Graham might never have been invited to the White House by any President.  Religion is a private observance that we have no right to police, so I utterly reject the view of Lanny Davis.

However, if the criticism of Obama that’s rooted in Wright’s rhetoric continues to linger, it will take the form of the narrative that Lanny Davis puts forward about judgment.  Where Obama has truly turned the page is that I don’t think Wright will do any more damage to Obama than has already been done.  Even if Wright continues to jump into the spotlight and say more outrageous things, they will no longer shadow Obama.  Obama has cast off the shadow.

It’s clear to me that the people trying to do the most harm to Obama’s reputation aren’t Republicans.  They are Clintons.  Of course, the reputation of the Clintons is pretty bad, so that’s why they work so hard to sully the reputation of any opponent they face.  Just look at the Bill Clinton administration, where the Clintons demonized women who, in the past, had been the object of Bill’s libido.  Look at the demonization of Ken Starr.  One can even look at the demonization of House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  It’s a credit to Barack Obama that the Clintons haven’t found enough information to use against Barack in their attempts to demonize him.

Behind the scenes, I think Clinton sympathizers did the bidding of the Clintons in setting the trap for Rev. Wright at the National Press Club.  I think the Clintons seized an opportunity when they sensed that Wright loves being in the spotlight, and the more he was in the spotlight, the more he’d be robbing Obama of the spotlight, and the greater the likelihood that Wright might do serious damage to Obama.   The interview with Bill Moyers was a walk in the park for Rev. Wright, and I think it made Wright a little more cocky by the time he spoke to the NAACP.  The NAACP audience was not one that was going to be hostile toward Wright, so since that went fairly well, I think Wright was lulled into a false sense of security and an overconfidence in his own ability to play the media like it was his own violin.  I think the Clintons had a hand in extending the speaking invitation to Wright, I think Wright was emboldened to accept the invitation because of his glowing self-assessment of the two prior speaking engagements, and I think that Clinton sympathizers at the National Press Club may have been egging Wright on with applause and laughter in the hopes that Wright would become more strident and say things that were more outrageous, and it worked.  Rev. Wright lacked judgment, though, because if there is an audience that’s not going to embrace a religious perspective, it would be a room full of journalists.  Why wouldn’t Wright know that?

Obama still has a lot of work to do.  His body language during the press conference about Wright wasn’t leaderly.  He clearly was agitated.  His usual facile way with words escaped him.  Clinton will try to propagate the narrative that she’s a leader, so as Obama needs to seize the spotlight, he also needs to epitomize power and leadership going forward in order to put the Clintons behind him.  That’s the next page Obama needs to turn.

Word of Mouth contributor Bruce Batista had these unflattering things to say about Sutton’s efforts in Congress to address the worsening oil crisis.  The staff of Betty Sutton, who represents Ohio’s 13th Congressional District in our nation’s capitol, sent this response.  I think the response falls flat, and I expressed my reasons for saying so over on WoM.

Obama should have granted an exclusive interview to Fox News much sooner.

I think the Democrats should have had a Nevada pre-primary debate on Fox News.

But no. Liberals everywhere screamed that having a Democrat debate on Fox News would only legitimize the channel that they deem to be a partisan tabloid.

If there were a Democrat and a Republican debating each other, and there was a perception that Fox was biased toward the Republicans, then I can understand the fuss. But when there are only Democrats?

How would a debate on Fox have been any worse than the one hosted by MSNBC where Hillary chided Tim Russert and Brian Williams for poor question selection and for making her answer the tough questions first while giving Barack an easy time of it?

How would a debate on Fox have been any worse than the one hosted by ABC, where the Obama campaign was aghast, again, at the question selection?

Were the criticisms about question selection even valid? After all, I can tell you what Clinton and Obama have said about health care, about the economy, about the war on terror, about Afghanistan, about Iraq, about our veterans, about No Child Left Behind, about housing foreclosures, about trade, about diplomacy, about the budget, and about taxes. Plus, they have legislative records that we can use to gauge their stance on a host of other issues. So, MSNBC and ABC both asked questions designed to establish the veracity of campaign messages, probing the sincerity of campaign advertisements, fleshing out the character of the candidates, seeing if the candidates had been telling the truth–in essence holding the candidates accountable for what they had been saying. What’s the harm in that? There’s a lot of good in that. Fox News could have accomplished those feats just as easily as the other networks, plus I think Fox would have pressed the two Democrats to more clearly define their immigration positions, which is something they’ve been too squishy on for fear of alienating either Latinos or alienating blue-collar whites when they are trying to lock up both constituencies.

Fox has viewers. Fox has ratings. Fox attracts advertisers. Fox is able to pay the bills and make a profit. That’s what legitimizes Fox. Sorry, liberals.

But the main reason why I say that Obama should have done an interview with Chris Wallace much sooner is that last night, on Bill O’Reilly, I saw that Obama had won a convert in the controversy over Rev. Wright. As I’ve already said, we shouldn’t attribute Wright’s views to Obama when Obama is saying something totally different than what Wright is saying. I, frankly, don’t care much for Mr. No-Spin-Zone, because I think he is overly subjective in his approach, and suffers from momentary lapses of logic. But when he rambled through his talking points at the top of the hour, I was amazingly in agreement with O’Reilly all the way through. What happened? Chris Wallace asked Barack Obama questions about Wright, and O’Reilly watched the interview. O’Reilly concluded that Obama was “a stand-up guy.” Those were his words . . . “a stand-up guy.” I noted that the interview caused many other observers, even at other networks, like CNN where Anderson Cooper hosted a panel of pundits, were believing that Obama really does disagree with the looped Wright rhetoric. There’s not much question of that anymore. Obama’s Fox interview achieved some good.

But Obama’s not out of the woods yet.

So far, the narrative that has emerged from the debates, interviews, and speeches is that Clinton is a feisty liar (Bosnia is but one illustration), while Barack is a transparent wimp. The transparency is a good thing. That’s what I like about Obama. But what Obama has to do now is to take the Democrat party by storm. He has to prove he’s a stronger, more powerful leader, and that as feisty a fighter as Clinton portrays herself to be, he has to show that he is the one who commands.

I realized last night that this Reverend Wright distraction will not go away until Obama, himself, pushes it away. Wright has begun making a flurry of appearances, heightening his notoriety, and sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Wright is clearly relishing the spotlight and is not going to relinquish it. Obama can’t afford to wait until this media frenzy over Wright dies down before getting the media to cover his candidacy on his terms again. Obama is already projected to lose Indiana.

I think what Obama needs to do is treat Wright as if he were Clinton or McCain in his speeches. Obama has said he won’t disown Wright, but he can still ridicule some of Wright’s rhetoric. After all, Obama says that he is a friend of Clinton, and that his supporters would embrace Clinton if she were the nominee, but that doesn’t stop him from ridiculing Clinton as an Annie Oakley wannabe. It didn’t stop Obama from ridiculing Clinton for hinting that the person in first place could accept the VP slot while the 2nd place person takes the C-in-C slot in order to unify the party. Obama says he respects McCain, but he’s given McCain a new first name–it’s not John anymore, it’s Bush. He can still maintain publicly that he feels friendship and respect for Wright while ridiculing Wright with wickedly funny barbs that mock the looped rhetoric. I think, if he does that, and people laugh are entertained by Obama’s repudiation of Wright’s rhetoric, Obama will have upstaged Wright, will have stolen the spotlight back from Wright, and can resume broadcasting a campaign message again. There are harsher, more dramatic steps Obama can take, too, and he should try them if this smoother approach doesn’t work, because he can’t allow Wright’s grandstanding to deny him the nomination. If he doesn’t act, not only will he lose primaries after Indiana’s, but he will fail to be acknowledged as a leader, and that could possibly lead to either a Clinton stealing the nomination, or McCain blowing him out in November.

Perhaps he could make an appearance on Hannity and Colmes and deliver his barbs while deflating Hannity at the same time. I’d like very much for Hannity to move off the Reverend Wright topic and move back to the substantive issues, perhaps expounding upon why raising taxes, even if on the “rich,” is the wrong approach to a mired economy. I think America needs to have a more sophisticated knowledge of the economy and taxes, but we won’t cross that bridge while we’re standing still jabbering about Rev. Wright.

If a Democrat is going to run as an inclusive unifier, someone who will be everyone’s president, then that Democrat needs to appear on Fox. If a Democrat is going to show that they are a strong leader that can weather the storms, then they need to appear on Fox, wear the storms are brewing. When a Democrat is going to exemplify audacity, then that Democrat needs to have the audacity to appear on Fox.