One of the problems with taking a month off from blogging are that some ideas go to seed.

I was considering the other day, however, about leadership. Every presidential administration is hit by the turmoil of managing many different, high strung personalities. Generally, this is where executive experience is important. You need to manage people because your ideas, strong as you may think they are, will be executed by someone else. That is why Clinton fired all the DOJ attorneys right off the bat. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and W all had governor backgrounds. W had a Harvard MBA and managed a sports team as well as Texas. George H.W. Bush had the CIA. Generals ran huge organizations.

Senators basically have a staff. Their work product is a vote and a law that is generally written by someone else. McCain, at least, ran several aviation units in the Navy.

Obama. Well, he has 143 days of work as a U.S. Senator. Even those few days were spend campaigning and voting present. In Chicago, he was a cog in the Daley machine before that. He claims to have had experience from running his campaign, although he had a campaign manager to actually, you know, run it. His time at the Chicago Annenburg Challenge was one where he basically handed out money. There was no work product because the kids he indoctrinated had no observable increases in their actual education. His other "community organizer" product was setting up a job bank (fail), setting up a "secondary economy (fail), and running a slum (fail).

Sidenote: It's at this point where I realized that Jesus wasn't a community organizer. Nope, Lenin was a community organizer. That's what Obama did, try to whip up the masses. But that's another post.

What does this mean for the 44th president? Well, he needs Rahm Emmanuel to keep his people in line because Obama is going to be overwhelmed. Executives can give big picture directional guidance. I don't think, however, that anything in Obama's history has prepared him for dealing with actual results based activities or dealing with other executives. You've seen people who've actually run states and armies get bogged down and betrayed by their staffs. Obama? he won't see it coming and won't know what to do about it.

Which brings me to the letter.

Obama claimed to have foreseen the Housing Crisis and its landslide impact into what he have now. That's a lie, of course. He loved sub prime loans and all the other things that were done to create this crisis.

Nonetheless, the letter he wrote is here.

Here is his leadership.

"There is grave concern in low-income communities about a potential coming wave of foreclosures. Because regulators are partly responsible for creating the environment that is leading to rising rates of home foreclosure in the subprime mortgage market, I urge you immediately to convene a homeownership preservation summit with leading mortgage lenders, investors, loan servicing organizations, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing-related agencies to assess options for private sector responses to the challenge."

Get it? Uh, can you please do something about this so that the people who got home loans they couldn't afford don't lose their homes.

It gets better:

"The summit should consider best practice loan marketing, underwriting, and origination practices consistent with the recent (and overdue) regulators’ Proposed Statement on Subprime Mortgage Lending. The summit participants should also evaluate options for independent loan counseling, voluntary loan restructuring, limited forbearance, and other possible workout strategies. I would also urge you to facilitate a serious conversation about the following:

* What standards investors should require of lenders, particularly with regard to verification of income and assets and the underwriting of borrowers based on fully indexed and fully amortized rates.

* How to facilitate and encourage appropriate intervention by loan servicing companies at the earliest signs of borrower difficulty.

* How to support independent community-based-organizations to provide counseling and work-out services to prevent foreclosure and preserve homeownership where practical.

* How to provide more effective information disclosure and financial education to ensure that borrowers are treated fairly and that deception is never a source of competitive advantage.

* How to adopt principles of fair competition that promote affordability, transparency, non-discrimination, genuine consumer value, and competitive returns.

* How to ensure adequate liquidity across all mortgage markets without exacerbating consumer and housing market vulnerability."

So, yeah, the lending industry was torn apart by people like Obama who forced banks to loan money to risky borrowers in the name of affordable housing. These loans are now decried by people like Obama as "predatory lending." Nonetheless, Obama looks past the damage to the financial sector done by FF/MM in packaging these risky loans into AAA rated MBS's guaranteed by the under capitalized FF/MM.

And also note, that he wanted to help community based organizations (i.e., ACORN) profit from the mess. Also, he wanted to figure out how to make the borrowers have an easier time not paying back their mortgages. That's the solution he had. You and me, homeowners that actually work and pay our bills on time, we're just a bunch of suckers.

Nope, his concern is keeping every one's villains, the idiots who got subprime loans when they couldn't afford them in their houses. Maverick and W both tried to actually fix the problem. Obama wants Bernanke to, uh, convene a summit to figure out how to give poor people more of your money. A job of a Senator is to do things like the things he wants someone else to do. Senators write laws. They hold hearings. They hopefully foresee and solve problems.

Obama simply wrote a letter to Santa Clause and addressed it to the guy who oversees the American money supply. AND IT MISSED THE WHOLE POINT OF THE CRISIS. The crisis was the cancer that these loans were. They killed the AAA rating of the MBS holding them, causing -under current idiotic mark to market laws- the inability of institutions holding these items from using them as valuations in their liquidity.

I wish that Bernanke sent the following reply:

"Dear Senator Obama,

After much research and deliberation, we have come up with the following response to your wishlist, fantasy, extortion letter:

Tell your deadbeat constituents to get jobs and pay their bills.

Thank you,

people who actually worked for a living."

(all my links and formatting got shot to hell, so imagine that this post looks nice and has links to cool stuff)