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Origins: When one of the hottest issues of a presidential campaign is the meltdown of the mortgage lending industry and the collapse of the economy, a candidate's having economic advisors on his staff who are strongly associated with the system and practices that helped create the current mess likely wouldn't sit well with the public. That's the premise of thie above-quoted e-mail, which claims that three men formerly associated with the Federal National Mortgage Association (commonly known as "Fannie Mae") are now serving as "chief economic advisors" with the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. However, although at least some of these men have had connections to the Obama campaign at one time or another, none of them has ongoing roles with that campaign as chief economic advisors.
Franklin Raines, who formerly headed the budget office for the Clinton administration, became the first black CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took over at Fannie Mae" in 1999. Raines,
who had earned $20 million in salary and bonuses from Fannie Mae in 2003, resigned from his CEO position in 2004 after regulators determined that the company had violated accounting rules and created an illusory $9 billion in past profit.
Raines has had some dealings with the Obama campaign, but he never held any actual position within the campaign, and his involvement with it was not nearly as substantial as implied here. As the Washington Post reported when a McCain campaign commercial attempted to link Raines with the Democratic candidate, the whole substance of the connection between the two men was that Raines "had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign" in which they talked about "general housing and economy issues."
Franklin Raines' predecessor, James A. Johnson, (former chief of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale), was CEO of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998. After Johnson left the company, regulators later discovered that Fannie Mae had engaged in fraudulent accounting practices in 1998 which manipulated its earnings so that executives could earn performance bonuses (up to $1.9 million in Johnson's case) they would not otherwise have been entitled to.
In May 2008, Senator Obama tapped James Johnson to be one member of a three-person panel tasked with vetting potential vice-presidential running mates. Johnson (who was not serving as an economic advisor to the Obama campaign) resigned from that position a month later after news accounts surfaced that he had received more than $2 million in home loans at below average market rates from Countrywide Financial (a partner of Fannie Mae).
Tim Howard, the former CFO (chief financial officer) of Fannie Mae, was caught up in the same accounting scandal that undid Franklin Raines, and (like Raines) resigned from the company in 2004. We haven't yet found any substantive connection between Tim Howard and the Obama campaign, however, much less any information supporting the claim that Howard is (or was) a "Chief Economic Advisor to Obama."
Last updated: 30 September 2008
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