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"wild-haired" !!

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Eric Schwerin
<eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com>wrote:

> Again, it is amazing what Ted's press office is doing in your
> absence! Clearly your presence there was holding them back.
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Alexander Snyder-Mackler <
> smacklera@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Everyone grab next week's issue!
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Alexander Snyder-Mackler
>> (302) 598-8678
>> ------------------------------
>> *From: * "Dudley, Amy (Kaufman)" <Amy_Dudley@kaufman.senate.gov>
>> *Date: *Thu, 8 Apr 2010 08:50:23 -0400
>> *To: *'smacklera@gmail.com'<smacklera@gmail.com>
>> *Subject: *Fw: TIME
>>
>>
>> --------------------------
>> Sent using BlackBerry
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From*: Seemans, Misty (Kaufman)
>> *To*: TK2010 (Kaufman); 'tedkaufman@comcast.net' <tedkaufman@comcast.net>
>>
>> *Cc*: Connaughton, Jeff (Kaufman); Dudley, Amy (Kaufman); Goldman, Ted
>> (Kaufman); Nolan, John (Kaufman)
>> *Sent*: Thu Apr 08 08:37:55 2010
>> *Subject*: TIME
>>
>> *TIME*
>>
>> *The Replacement Senator Causing Democrats Fits on Financial Reform*
>>
>> *By Michael Scherer*
>>
>>
>>
>> As the lamest of the Senate's lame ducks, Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman
>> should be coasting at this point. No matter what happens in November, he
>> will be out of a job a few days later, when his two-year turn as Vice
>> President Joe Biden's appointed replacement comes to an end. "I'm junior,"
>> the wild-haired, 71-year-old former Biden staffer admits. "I can't get more
>> junior."
>>
>>
>>
>> But instead of sailing quietly into oblivion, Kaufman has decided to make
>> waves. Most notably, he is challenging his Senate colleagues — and the Obama
>> Administration — to get behind far tougher financial regulations than they
>> have yet proposed, a move that has been unsettling to both bank lobbyists
>> and White House aides. "I think most people know that I am really cranked up
>> about this," Kaufman says with a smile.
>>
>>
>>
>> In late March, after most of his colleagues had split for the Easter
>> holiday, Kaufman lingered on the Senate floor, waiting for his chance to
>> address rows of empty chairs, a few pimple-faced pages and the C-SPAN
>> cameras in his latest well-sourced broadside against the conventional wisdom
>> on Wall Street and in the White House. "Unless Congress breaks up the
>> megabanks that are 'too big to fail,' " he declared to an empty chamber,
>> "the American taxpayer will remain the ultimate guarantor in an
>> almost-certain-to-repeat-itself cycle of boom, bust and bailout."
>>
>>
>>
>> As a policy matter, Kaufman's prediction is heavily debated among
>> economists. But as politics, his critique threatens to undermine the White
>> House's finely tuned election-year story line. To hear President Obama or
>> his aides tell it, the coming Senate debate on financial regulatory reform
>> will offer a clear choice to voters this fall between most Democrats who are
>> defending the interests of Main Street and most Republicans who are in the
>> pocket of Wall Street. Kaufman, by contrast, argues that neither party has
>> yet shown much seriousness about undoing decades of deregulation, and
>> nonregulation, that created the conditions for the financial collapse in the
>> first place.
>>
>>
>>
>> "Little in these reforms is really new," Kaufman says of the current White
>> House–backed Democratic Banking Committee plan. He calls the provisions for
>> new "resolution authority" to dissolve failing banks "an illusion," since
>> the sheer size of the institutions makes painless, prepackaged liquidation
>> unlikely. He worries about loopholes that exempt certain highly profitable
>> derivatives from federal oversight. But most of all, he believes the current
>> Senate plan, which relies on the wisdom of bank regulators, won't prevent
>> another crisis. "The sad reality is that regulators had substantial powers,"
>> he announced during another Senate-floor speech in March, "but chose to
>> abdicate their responsibilities."
>>
>>
>>
>> The White House has mostly avoided direct public engagement with its
>> unlikely critic. On ABC's This Week recently, White House economic aide
>> Larry Summers dodged a question about Kaufman's complaints. "Senator Kaufman
>> is exactly right," he said instead, sympathizing with the concern about
>> large bank failures. In fact, on whether to dismantle the largest banks, it
>> would be hard for the two men to disagree more.
>>
>>
>>
>> Kaufman, who has taught politics at Duke and holds an MBA from Wharton,
>> traces the roots of the collapse to what he calls the "great regulatory
>> meltdown" of the past two decades, a move that was largely endorsed by
>> Summers when he served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. But
>> the Senator has been careful to avoid criticizing Democrats directly. He
>> says he has not talked with the White House — or former boss Biden — about
>> these issues and has only words of praise for Connecticut Senator Chris
>> Dodd, a onetime champion of deregulation who wrote the Banking Committee
>> bill. "We just have a very different view," he says.
>>
>>
>>
>> In his Senate office, Kaufman has stacked the latest books on the
>> financial crisis on his desk, background reading for his regular trips to
>> New York to meet with bankers and analysts. Financial regulation is a
>> crusade he never expected to take on when he accepted his two-year posting.
>> But his 32 years as a Senate aide taught him not to be discouraged by long
>> odds.
>>
>>
>>
>> "One of the reasons I love this place is, I have been hanging out here
>> since 1973, and you never know what's going to happen," he says. In other
>> words, Kaufman is confident that the last big fight of his short Senate
>> career has only just begun.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Eric D. Schwerin
> Rosemont Seneca Partners
> (202) 333-1880
> eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
>
>


--

Alexander Snyder-Mackler
(302) 598-867