He’s got a million of ’em.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.

ACORN’s first big target in Chicago was Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association. While poring over the ACORN archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society, I ran across the extensive preparation ACORN Chicago made for that first battle, including lots of correspondence with Bell Federal itself.
What struck me reading over the documents was Bell Federal’s naive confidence in its position. They knew that they’d treated all their mortgage customers the same, regardless of race–in fact they were proud of this–and Bell rightly insisted that undercutting credit standards in the name of supposed fairness was the surest way to financial disaster. Little did Bell Federal suspect the assault about to be launched against it–the massive campaign to portray it as a nest of evil, racist capitalists, with the usual bogus statistical claims that anything less than total equality of result meant discrimination.
True, the Bush administration did far too little to challenge the bad credit practices first solidified by Fannie Mae under Clinton administration pressure. And yes, Wall Street did far too much to exploit the irresponsible subprime regime of its day, leading to disaster in 2008. But responsible capitalism didn’t go down without a fight. I think of Bell Federal’s naive and noble–but doomed–resistance to ACORN, and Fannie Mae’s equally bitter battle to hold ACORN at bay–well before the horror story recounted by Morgenson and Rosner played out. It took a lot of heavy lifting by ACORN and its supporters to break down years of prudent business practice, embodied in the credit standards all sane bankers once rightly insisted on. Only after those standards were compromised did we reap the whirlwind.
Obama was intimately familiar with the battle to undermine America’s credit standards, and in full philosophical sympathy with it. It took a one-two punch of Alinskyite intimidation and federal regulatory pressure to create the preconditions for the subprime crisis of 2008, and Obama was on board for all of it. Yet he managed to convince the country, with barely a peep to the contrary from McCain, that the real problem was the lack of regulation.