Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation

petrfitz: Both parties are knee-deep in the stink from Fannie and Freddie. This latest story is clever and well-timed, because it tends to neutralize a major Republican talking point, and the details (what the bill was, who supported it, and what Freddie wanted from the lobbying effort) are too complex for most voters to bother with. It happens that McCain was probably on the right side of this issue, but it's hard to keep track with so much money flying around on both sides of the aisle.

Anyway, the reality is that the whole Fannie-Freddie argument is a sideshow that's getting lots of play because neither party wants to take on the 500-pound gorilla in the room: misguided government subsidization of home ownership. Fannie and Freddie - and their incentuous relations with politicians of both parties - were a symptom, not the underlying disease.

Since McCain is taking the fake-populist line and advocating massive government intervention to prop up home prices, he has to bury his real free-market beliefs and argue that the problem with Fannie and Freddie was Democratic corruption, not a fundamentally misguided charter. Against that narrow line of attack, the Democrats just have to show that the Republicans were equally dirty.