Senate Democrats are breaking ranks to block the reconfirmation of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Sens. Russell Feingold (D-WI) and Barabara Boxer (D-CA) were the latest liberals to join lefty colleagues Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who instigated the anti-Bernanke rebellion.
This is the direction the Democrats need to move in if they want to head off a potentially bloody 2010 at the polls. There is populist anger brewing at President Obama—and in turn, his party—for not making good on his 2008 campaign promises of changing business as usual when it comes to Wall Street. Quite the contrary, Obama has become synonymous with the Wall Street bailout.
Sen. Cantwell, who’s not on the anti-Bernanke list yet, has been pushing a populist agenda (since her crusade to clean up the Enron mess, really), but notably during the first 12 months of the Obama administration, directly on Obama’s Wallstreet agenda— running interference on the bailouts and trashing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner— as she’s also fought to tax capital gains to fund Medicare and gotten language in health care reform to rein in pharmaceutical hyper profits.
Sen. Cantwell, photo by Peter Parker
This is Cantwell’s strong suit. And when I saw the NYT headline —“Opposition Grows Against Second Term for Bernanke”—I was certain I was going to be reading about Washington state’s junior senator once again in the national media. (But she didn’t show up on the list.)
Her year of below-the-radar-screen populism got noticed in December by Newsweek (which called her a “firebrand”), when she teamed up with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to reinstate the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act. Cantwell and McCain want to put a firewall between commercial banking—what you and I do at Bank of America— and investment banking. More populism 101.
Asked where Sen. Cantwell is on Bernanke, her spokesman John Diamond told PubliCola: “She’s undecided on Bernanke.”
Meanwhile, her comrade on opposing the $700 billion bank bailout last year, Sen. Feingold, had this to say about opposing Bernanke in today’s New York Times:
“Under the watch of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve permitted grossly irresponsible financial activities that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
