ABSTRACT
Advisers to a presidential campaign are notoriously a dime a dozen and a nickel a gross; on economic as on foreign policy, Obama inevitably has advisers on many sides of the same questions. Vice presidential choices may not tell us much more, but it is still dispiriting to recall that the Democratic nominee for VP helped craft and pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, one of the most loathsome pieces of class legislation since Robert Walpole’s Black Act of 1724. Biden is among the top recipients of campaign contributions from the extraordinarily predatory credit card industry. My daily paper reports that Obama has pulled three times the number of contributions greater than $25,000 from the financial industry as McCain has, and was in recent years the senator who received the second highest amount of contributions from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. It is of course possible that Obama and Biden have received this largesse and promised nothing in return. And no matter what they may have promised, we can certainly hope that Obama and Biden, having won the highest offices in the land, will gloriously prove to be what the great Tammany sage George Washington Plunkett stigmatized as dishonest politicians: ones who do not stay bought. We can always hope.
