I’m starting to think that Obama and Biden are trying to work FDR into their rhetoric by hook or crook. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were doing deliberately in an attempt to appeal to the elderly vote since they think they’ll lose it to McCain.

Oh, I didn’t say I was sweating it or that they would be successful. I only wondered if this was more than a coincidence and an attempt to get people who used to vote for the ghost of FDR to vote for them.

I was curious about this too. The first thing I came across was your site which just denied that what Obama said was true. But, there wasn’t anything to back up what you were saying. It turns out that there was a New Deal agency called the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation which helped people to avoid foreclosure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOLC

It did turn a profit in the end. If this is what Obama was referring to, then FDR only bought houses to get better loan terms for the occupants. This did keep them off the market, and with about a million such transactions, probably supported home prices a little.

If we want to look at today’s situation, we probably have more homes than people to live in them so keeping things off the market would likely involve keeping them vacant. That is not a big problem if we buy the homes a $0.10 on the dollar or so using eminant domain. http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4563#comment-412950 We’d still turn a profit.

Quite aside from the fact that Obama either does not know what he’s talking about (hardly a surprise… he doesn’t know much about economics either), or was lying for effect, being too arrogant to believe he’d be found out, I am fascinated by PBS liberal Jim Lehrer’s use of the word “rule” to describe the American president’s relationship with the American people.

Lehrer has been critical of President Bush for assuming too much “executive authority” on any number of occasions that I have seen, yet here he is, a man whose professional life is supposedly built on objectivity and linguistic precision, using the word “rule” as though the US president was supposed to be a world-class autocrat or even royalty. Most peculiar!

I picked up on the same thing. FDR never bought houses, that’s crazy talk. Obama stated that he never said he would attack Pakistan? i remember him looking square in the camera and saying he would attack Pakistan, just as he said he would have sent troops to Georgia when they had their conflict. Not only does he not know American history, or economics, but he knows nothing about foreign relations… He says he wants to improve America’s relationships in the world, but threatens to invade other countries and sit down and chat with terrorist dictators.