Word: carefully
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...fact, Democrats in Washington and even within the Administration were at odds over dozens of provisions. As with health care, there are serious differences on financial reform between the House and the Senate, and the Democratic caucus within the Senate is again divided. And as the House bill got watered down a bit, some reformers saw Treasury's fingerprints. For example, Michael Greenberger, a policy adviser to Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of union, consumer and environmental groups, says Treasury lobbied "vigorously" for loopholes exempting certain over-the-counter derivatives from new regulations, a key objective of centrist...
...That was a bumpy road even before Massachusetts left Democrats with only 59; months of bipartisan Senate negotiations over health care reform attracted zero Republican votes, as did the financial-reform package that passed the House in December. And White House officials admit they underestimated how ugly Capitol Hill's sausagemaking process would look in the spotlight, turning a debate about expanding health coverage, controlling costs and reining in the abuses of profit-obsessed insurers into a brawl over "death panels," taxpayer-funded abortions and congressional giveaways to Nebraska. (See the financial crisis after one year...
...Consumer Financial Protection Agency "nonnegotiable," drawing a clear contrast with Republicans and financial lobbyists on a relatively simple issue that polls extremely well - but risking a stalemate in the Senate Banking Committee, where the GOP and several Democrats have expressed doubts about a new bureaucracy. After health care, that's a price the Administration is now willing to pay. It's no coincidence that the day before Obama announced his latest push to crack down on big banks, his confidants David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett met with Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) watchdog Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual mother...
...conspicuously not the case with health care reform, the Administration has laid out specific changes it wants to see in financial oversight. In June, Geithner released an 88-page paper with proposals to address just about everything that went wrong before the meltdown, from unregulated brokers who peddled toxic subprime mortgages with brutal fine print to in-the-tank ratings agencies that vouched for house-of-cards financial instruments they didn't even understand. He proposed much tougher oversight of derivatives, hedge funds and nonbank financial firms like AIG, as well as so-called resolution authority to help public officials...
...This is not to say the White House wants an issue rather than a bill. It wants both, especially if health care dies and leaves Democrats short on achievements to brag about in 2010. It's simply decided that the most plausible path to a bill is to warn the public that the financial system is still a ticking bomb, and to try to make opposition to strong reform tantamount to support for the terrorists in fancy suits. The problem is that on an issue this complex, with so many contentious provisions and alternative proposals floating around, naysayers are always...