I'm hardly an enormous cheerleader for Obama, as those on these boards are well aware, but I'll defend him on at least two of the attacks launched by that article--the "housing" and "education" attacks.
As the article notes, HAMP hasn't actually done a whole lot, while 2.5 million foreclosures were filed last year and millions of additional mortgages are underwater and/or in default even if no foreclosure has been filed against the defaulting homeowners just yet. On the flip side, one has to wonder what exactly the article's authors wanted him to do. The article says this:
Part of the issue, says Feltner, is that the administration didn't go far enough to fix some of the structural problems that led to the housing crash, such as "making sure borrowers with loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had access to loan modification.... And making sure that borrowers can maintain house ownership."
In its analysis of Obama's housing programs, The Washington Post sums up the administration's policy by saying: "they consistently unveiled programs that underperformed, did little to reduce mortgage debts owed by ordinary Americans and rejected a get-tough approach with banks...
"Making sure that borrowers can maintain house ownership?" Should the takeaway from this be that Obama should have undertaken to completely eliminate foreclosures, regardless of how underwater the underlying loan was? Under what circumstance could such an incredible reward for incredible irresponsibility be justified? And how would one avert the moral hazard issue from the message such a policy would send to other homeowners--after all, if banks can't foreclose on their worst borrowers, then there's no incentive for anyone to pay their mortgage either, other than the soft dictates of one's own conscience.
As for the "get-tough approach with banks," this could mean anything. It's true that Obama was and is fairly close to the financial sector, but one has to wonder how "getting tough" with banks actually means here.
With respect to education, the problems with urban public education are many and varied and beyond the means of any one person--even the president--to solve. Nevertheless, Obama's Race to the Top program is one of his signature accomplishments and one reason that I may well pull the lever in his favor in November (particularly given the weakness of the GOP field). In all of that article's harangue about "loss of local control," not a single word is mentioned about the actual tangible results of the Race to the Top program, which has already been positive.
Bottom line: If this is the most serious attack against Obama's urban policy (or education policy, or housing policy) that his own ostensible ideological relatives can come up with, it becomes pretty obvious why he didn't face any serious primary opposition from within his own party.
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