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The vast majority of the time, Mitt Romney is a strikingly smooth candidate. After nearly six years of running for the presidency, practically non-stop, the guy is effectively a professional candidate — he’s always on message; he’s prepared for every question; and he has his stump speech down so well, he could probably recite it backwards.
Once in a while, though, he’ll accidentally say what he’s thinking, and in the process, give his rivals valuable campaign ammunition.
Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney suggested he doesn’t support foreclosure relief for the millions of Americans struggling with underwater mortgages, untold numbers of which have been the victims of fraudulent lending or foreclosure practices.
In a filmed interview with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper serving the hardest-hit foreclosure state in the union, Romney criticized President Barack Obama for not foreclosing on American families fast enough.
“Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom,” Romney said when asked what he would do to jump-start the floundering housing market.
The video of the comments is online here.
This probably isn’t a position that will hurt Romney in the Republican primaries, but if he’s looking ahead to the general election, it won’t help the GOP ticket if the nominee is the pro-foreclosure candidate. The number of voters hostile towards underwater homeowners and foreclosed-upon families is probably pretty small.
As Zach Carter noted, this is especially true given that so many banks have been engaged in outrageous practices, including foreclosing on homes without any authority to do so, and in some cases, approving thousands of foreclosure filings without even validating the claims.
Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for the Obama campaign to weigh in.
“Mitt Romney’s message to Nevada homeowners struggling to pay their mortgage bills is simple: you’re on your own, so step aside,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a written statement. “Instead of offering an opportunity, like President Obama has, for responsible homeowners who were scammed by their lender or trapped by falling housing prices to refinance, Governor Romney believes we should instead let the foreclosure process ‘run its course and hit the bottom’ so that investors can come in and make a quick buck after families lose their homes.”
There’s also the larger context to consider. Romney — who pays a lower tax rate than working-class families, despite being a multi-millionaire — is also running on a platform of higher middle-class taxes, more massive tax breaks for the wealthy, and allowing Wall Street to do whatever it wants.
And now Romney thinks policymakers should stop trying to stop the foreclosure process? If the Obama campaign’s goal is to make the Republican frontrunner look like an enemy to the middle class, Romney is making the Dems’ job easier.
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T2 on October 18, 2011 2:54 PM:
jump start = hit bottom. Good to know how Mitt looks at things.
rikyrah on October 18, 2011 2:58 PM:
but, this is the REAL Mittens. this is his heart and soul
Quaker in a Basement on October 18, 2011 3:00 PM:
Well, look on the bright side.
If there were more foreclosures, there'd be more empty houses on the real estate market. The banks would need to hire somebody to go round once in a while and mow the lawns and chase away the squatters.
Maybe they could hire the people who used to live in those houses! It's a jobs plan!
stormskies on October 18, 2011 3:05 PM:
Yep, and all the while he is rebuilding his one of how many homes in LaJolla, California..expanding it to 40,000 square feet to meet his 'personal needs' .......
Trollop on October 18, 2011 3:05 PM:
I'm more of a "Herb" Cain guy myself!
"9-9-9"-9/11, 9-9-9, 9/11-9-9-9"
Our first black President!
(Takes handful of haldol..)
Pro-foreclosure, at least he's a creative son-of-a-bitch!
zeitgeist on October 18, 2011 3:09 PM:
*waits for the rabid neo-Austrians to show up and scroll the thread screaming about the importance of Schumpeter*
DAY on October 18, 2011 3:10 PM:
Mitt will purloin Cain's answer-
The new 'get-out-of- anything card' is: "I was joking!"
SYSPROG on October 18, 2011 3:21 PM:
Alrighty MEDIA! Your next bit of homework (that you'll NOT do) is to get to the bottom line. 'Mitt? Is there absolutely ANYTHING you will do to help the middleclass or is everyone of your policies just geared to those that donate to you?'
abc on October 18, 2011 3:29 PM:
It must be hard for Obama to resist the urge to hold his fire until after the nominating process. Doubly so because Romney seems to be trying to egg him on with the "he doesn't believe we're exceptional" BS.
But I am looking forward to a campaign against Mr. "let Detroit go bankrupt," Mr. "I pay 14% in income taxes and am distressed that children, old people and the poor don't contribute enough," Mr. "triple my house size, but make sure foreclosures go through," Mr. "money hanging out of my pockets," Mr. "I never said things were worse," Mr. "for the stimulus before he was against it," etc.
Barbara Boxer flayed Carly Fiorina in ads in Cal. showing people who had been laid off after decades at HP, only to see their jobs shifted overseas. I'm sure Dems will able to find some of the folks whose jobs were terminated by Bain Capital takeovers, or who invested in Bain's turnaround projects that ended in bankruptcy.
square1 on October 18, 2011 3:35 PM:
Obama is running on HAMP? Really?
DAY on October 18, 2011 3:35 PM:
"I'm sure Dems will able to find some of the folks whose jobs were terminated by Bain Capital takeovers"-abc
The late senator Ted Kennedy did just that, importing a bunch of rust belt folks when Mitt ran for senate in MA.
zeitgeist on October 18, 2011 3:42 PM:
@square 1 - he doesn't have to run on it. he can run on Mitt's reaction to it, which is a much better campaign.
TR on October 18, 2011 4:01 PM:
Of course he wants middle-class families' homes foreclosed. That's the only way he can buy up their properties, bulldoze the homes, and get an appropriate view of the ocean for his multimillion-dollar vacation home.
square1 on October 18, 2011 4:06 PM:
@zeitgeist: The foreclosure issue is not black and white. While most Americans are sympathetic to those who are at risk of losing their homes, people want fairness. That means that any whiff of irresponsible borrowers being bailed out is not going to be popular.
“Instead of offering an opportunity, like President Obama has, for responsible homeowners who were scammed by their lender or trapped by falling housing prices to refinance...
If the administration gave a shit about systemic fraud in the industry, it would aggressively investigate and, when crimes were uncovered, prosecute. It wouldn't try to protect banks by rushing to settle the robo-signing investigations.
The government could provide a valuable service by investigating and making public evidence of actual fraud. Then individual borrowers could use that evidence to defend against foreclosure actions.
I honestly can't say which I find to be more vile: Romney's ignorance of the corporate crimes which led to the foreclosure crisis or Obama's apparent awareness...and refusal to take substantive action.
Ron Byers on October 18, 2011 4:43 PM:
Romney's comment makes him look like snidley whiplash, but the problem Obama has is that his voluntary mortgage relief program is a cruel hoax for millions of Americans. I can point to numerous examples in my own bankruptcy practice of people trying to work with the voluntary program but losing their houses anyway, not because of their inability to make payments.
Nobody in the Wall Street/Washington Axis has lifted a finger to actually help struggling homeowners.
There is a reason Occupy Wall Street doesn't want to embrace the Democrats and the Obama administration. They have been decidedly out to lunch on mortgage foreclosures for years.
nycweboy on October 18, 2011 7:30 PM:
The Obama Administration's response to the foreclosure mess has been days and dollars short for years now, providing almost no relief to homeowners, protecting banks, and generally mucking up the legal morass of CDOs, transfer processes when the states are trying harder to serve their consumers. To say that they can "capitalize" on Romney taking a somewhat harsher position on foreclosure is wishful. One reason we have Occupy Wall Street is precisely because a large swath of the left has lost patience with Obama's economic team, especially Tim Geithner, whose Treasury Dept is a big reason foreclosure solutions have been so poor. Absent plans to replace Geithner (which he shows no sign of), it strikes me as hard for Obama to look much better than Romney on really doing things people need in foreclosure.
Second, Romeney has a point, although a cold one: we can;'t really get a fresh start on housing until the foreclosure and mortgage mess is unwound, and protecting those in foreclosure from settlement is not a long term solution. Either people need to renegotiate mortgages and banks need to take major losses (with a lot of economic pain to follow) or foreclosures need to happen, home prices need to drop through yet another floor and we rebuild from there (with a lot of economic, and social, pain to follow). These are terrible times with terrible problems. And I'm no fan of Republicans... but Democrats will be in the worst of all worlds if Obama crawls to reelection and mortgages and foreclosures simply get worse. Romney is unlikely to be our next President, but not because he says practical, cold hearted things about the economic climate. And if the left can't figure out how to do better on the foreclosure mess, OWS will not just be a limited street protest.
exlibra on October 18, 2011 8:11 PM:
While both vultures and hyenas are, both, smelly scavengers, hyenas are worse. Vultures wait till their potential dinner dies, before they descend to feast on the carcass; hyenas kill the weak and struggling, if they don't die fast enough. Romney is a typical hyena capitalist -- first with his Bain firm, then with his "let Detroit die", now with his "let the scammed homeowners die, too".
Doug on October 18, 2011 8:33 PM:
Just how many people are assigned to the HAMP program? How many people are working for the DoJ? How many qualified people are available to sift through the evidence, investigate and then lay their findings in front of their higher-ups in both organizations? As non-Defense Federal employment is at its lowest level for decades that, rather than any lack of interest, may explain much of what's NOT happened.
For any caring to think about it, that is...
Anonymous on October 18, 2011 10:48 PM:
Some cities in the Bay Area are still in court fights with banks over properties abandoned - but they won't let go of the title - damaged in the '89 earthquake.
Letting house values crash not only kicks more people out - it basically kicks nearly everyone out. Not to mention just the physical damage to having abandoned houses in the neighborhood.
Crissa on October 18, 2011 11:00 PM:
Yeah, Obama will have trouble capitalizing on this, since HAMP sucks.
What we need to make sure is that banks should be taking the heat for this - they're the ones who wrote the loans and the rules for how houses are valued. They basically set the prices for houses on the way up - so they should take the hurt for when the prices came back down.
Very few home buyers actually know much about the price of building a home. I know that the sticks that make my house cost $70K but that the permits to make it are nearly priceless. And yet, the county values the sticks that make my home at $50K and the insurance values it at $120K.
square1 on October 18, 2011 11:28 PM:
@Doug: Just stop. You are embarrassing yourself. The flaw with HAMP isn't a shortage of government employees to administer the program. The flaw is the design of the program. It was never designed to force the banks to modify mortgages. Rather, it allowed banks to milk homeowners dry: The banks are permitted to tease homeowners into trial remods and then still foreclose.
This is a feature not a bug for a Treasury Department that is effectively run as a joint venture between Goldman Sachs and Citi. The program has been administered as designed.
As for cracking down on securities fraud, are you seriously suggesting that the absolute dearth of Wall Street prosecutions is attributable to...a lack of lawyers in the Justice Department. Seriously?
yellowdog on October 19, 2011 1:51 AM:
@square1 on October 18, 2011 11:28 PM:
It's a complicated issue, but the capacity of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to actually enforce laws against dirty dealing on Wall Street is a major issue. In short, the GOP House is seeking to gut the SEC entirely, not just block enforcement of the new Dodd-Frank law. It is a fight to free Wall Street from basic accountability--and mundane things like the SEC's computer systems and staffing levels are big parts of the fight.
Check out this op-ed from Bill Clinton's SEC Chair, describing the issues and the GOP's "underfunding and micromanaging [of the SEC]": http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/opinion/dont-gut-the-sec.html?_r=1&ref=securitiesandexchangecommission
yellowdog on October 19, 2011 1:52 AM:
@square1 on October 18, 2011 11:28 PM:
It's a complicated issue, but the capacity of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to actually enforce laws against dirty dealing on Wall Street is a major issue. In short, the GOP House is seeking to gut the SEC entirely, not just block enforcement of the new Dodd-Frank law. It is a fight to free Wall Street from basic accountability--and mundane things like the SEC's computer systems and staffing levels are big parts of the fight.
Check out this op-ed from Bill Clinton's SEC Chair, describing the issues and the GOP's "underfunding and micromanaging [of the SEC]": http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/opinion/dont-gut-the-sec.html?_r=1&ref=securitiesandexchangecommission
Doug on October 19, 2011 8:16 PM:
Thank you for the FACTS, yellowdog and sorry about the delay i responding. I recalled reading something about the SEC computer systems, but couldn't remember where OR when.
Like most people I prefer items that support my contentions rather than refute them, but whether pro or con, I place factual evidence 'way above what "everybody knows".