The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands

So the Democrats are encouraging Americans to man the barricades in outrage at protest at bonuses to AIG executives, while the White House frantically rearranges the deckchairs, hanging Chris Dodd and increasingly Tim Geithner out as bait to a public that is staring in disbelief as an administration they elected on the basis of its supposed intellectual and ethical firepower has done more to wreck the economy in eight weeks than the Bush administration did in eight years.

Nevermind that the people who crashed AIG are long gone, and it is the workers who have been brought in to clean up the mess who now work under armed guard, fearful for their safety. What was that about the Right always stoking anger and violence in the community again?

The thing is that as outrageous as the situation at AIG is, it is the Obama White House that is largely behind the bonus outrage, not Chris Dodd. And believe me, as someone who has no love for the ethically-challenged Connecticut Senator, and hopes he is pensioned off to his Irish cottage where he can do no harm, this is a painful thing to write. As Glenn Greenwald, hardly a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, writes at Salon.com, "It was Obama officials, not Dodd, who demanded that already-vested bonus payments be exempted. And it was Dodd, not Obama officials, who wanted the prohibition applied to all compensation agreements, past and future. The provision which shielded already-promised bonus payments from the executive compensation limits ended up being inserted at the insistence of Geithner".

It's early days but Obama has form with this sort of "modified limited hangout". Remember, last year's tightly-disciplined Obama campaign had no qualms about throwing advisors under the proverbial bus. Heck, back then the then-junior senator from Illinois had no trouble throwing his aging grandmother under the bus.

The fact is, as much as Democrats and the White House may enjoy stoking eat-the-rich class warfare in the hopes that there's a little bit of Hugo Chavez in all of us, they need to take ownership of this problem. Fannie Mae, which did so much to get America - and the world - into this mess is paying out huge bonuses, but somehow they get a pass.