Barney Frank’s Campaign is in Trouble

Bringing back a line from Jack Nicholson in “As Good as it Gets”, is Sean Bielat making Barney Frank “want to be a better man”?  According to Margery Eagan of the Boston Herald – yup!

Margery wrote:

Yesterday I asked him some questions. I was bracing to get hammered by his reply.

This time, though, he didn’t tell me I was asking something dumb. He didn’t get mad. He didn’t lecture me on what I should be asking instead.

Huh, what could be going on?  Well DUH, it’s Sean.  In recent polling Frank holds now less than 50% of likely voters.  While this demostrates a 10 point lead for Frank (48% for Frank and 38% for Bielat), his command of Massachusett’s District 4 is slipping.

But a September 22nd release from the Bielat camp contained a poll of independents that showed a 51% to 34% lead for Bielat over Frank – the widest margin to-date.  Back in July, it was Frank that held a lead with the same group of likely voters.

What happened?  The people have figured out that Barney Frank is a centrally-responsible figure for the current economic collapse.

from boston.com

The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to “meet the credit needs” of “low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods.” Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this “subprime” lending by authorizing ever more “flexible” criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.

Barney Frank spent 2008 and 2009 making statements that it was our Free Market economy that caused the problem.  In fact, he alludes that perhaps Ronald Reagan is to blame.

If that wasn’t enough to turn Massachusetts voters off, this year Frank turned on Fannie and Freddie, the semi-government agencies that he had been protecting all this time.  In an August 2010 interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business News, Frank told Neil that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, “..should be abolished”.

Maybe it’s not that hard to see why Sean Bielat is becoming so much more attractive to Massachusetts voters – Barney Frank is blowing it.

Then again, maybe he is just spending too much time discussing an exit strategy.