In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

If there's anything there's overwhelming bipartisan support for, it's financial reform.  Both the motivated voters on the left and the right are pissed off because the banks got bailouts and the rest of us are paying for them.  It's such a simple concept to pound the GOP on reform.

But the Democrats refuse to do so.  Specifically, President Obama refuses to do so.  Digby asks:

In any case, financial reform is not health care reform. It's very important, but it doesn't directly affect many average citizens' lives and does not carry the moral imperative that HCR does, certainly among the liberals. Passing something lame is not "laying the groundwork" for something better, it's just passing something lame. It's not creating a huge new program or establishing something important that can be built upon later. This is a fairly simple set of regulations and new regulatory structures which have a targeted job --- eliminate or reduce the systemic risk that caused the meltdown of the global financial system in the fall of 2008. They need to do this right.

I'm sure the White House would love to have a lovely bipartisan bill symbolizing a new day of peace, love and understanding. And maybe they'll get it. But they'd better watch out. There are Democrats on the left who feel zero obligation to play ball on a bill that benefits big banks and whose loyalty to the White House was badly frayed during the last year. And there may be some Republicans on the right who refuse to play ball for any number of reasons, not the least of which is to deny Obama any kind of bipartisan victory. So Obama will likely have to stitch together a coalition of his favorite "centrists" from both parties to put this thing together and hope that he can beat a filibuster in the Senate. (How many of those are there?)It seems to me that if it's going to be that kind of a dog fight he might as well get a decent bill. So far, it doesn't look as if he particularly wants one.

Why the White House doesn't want the Democrats to have even one issue that speaks to the electorate's populist fervor this fall is a question for the age.

Allow me to answer.

Any guy who kept Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner around was never serious about financial reform in any way, shape or form.  Period.  Ever.  The Democrats aren't going to sign off of a real reform bill.  The Republicans will fight it tooth and nail.  It's almost like both parties are in the pockets of the banking industry.  If Obama was serious about financial reform, he would have passed it already.  Instead, it's been sitting on the bench even longer than HCR was.

And on the bench it will remain.  Obama's not stupid.  He knows he can't piss off the big banks, especially not now in the wake of Citizens United meaning banks can unload unlimited millions to destroy the Dems in campaign advertising.  Certainly no Senator is going to make a stand.  Certainly not 60 of them.

No, unlike HCR, which I always knew would pass, financial reform doesn't have a chance in hell.

It never did.  Anyone who thought it did is delusional.