So when the Senate's Greatest Bailout Cheerleader, New Hampshire's Senior Senator Judd Gregg, realized what an electoral liability it would be to stay on the TARP oversight panel he was appointed to, he promptly ditched it, claiming he was too busy.
Well, who better to fill his partisan shoes than the man we spent a lot of time and effort kicking out, none other than New Hampshire's (soon to be former) Junior Senator, John E. Sununu?. Here's Mitch McConnell, pretending that John E. is a fan of oversight:
"Sen. Sununu has long been a leader on economic and financial market issues and has dedicated his career to ensuring that Congress remains good stewards of taxpayer funds,"
Riiiiiiight.
Now, over at Blue Hampshire we spent two long years getting to know Sununu Junior and his record on fiscal issues. The man is a true believer in as little regulation as possible. He's is, in short, radical free market ideologue.
But don't believe me. Just look to his idols:
Asked whom he most admires in Washington politics, Sununu names Phil Gramm -- the retiring senator from Texas whose bona fides as a social conservative were sometimes overshadowed by his passion for free-market economics.
Oh, that's so 2002, you say. Well, try these more recent vids on for size:
A partial trasncript:
Current chairman of the federal reserve, former chairman of the federal reserve, and many many economists have argued very strenuously that hedge funds provide a very valuable role in our capital markets. They keep them flexible, they keep them responsive, and they provide a distribution of risk to the capital markets and that if you start regulating them aggressively you're going to lose that flexibility, the liquidity and the innovation of the capital markets that have helped, that have been a big help in keeping our economy relatively strong, quite consistently, not just over the past five years, but really over the past twenty-five years since our economy was dramatically reformed under Ronald Reagan.... Limited regulation, a Reagan idea.
I can't wait to see what bold calls for oversight Sununu makes from this perch to keep his name rec in play for Gregg's seat or the Governor's chair in 2010 new spot on the oversight board.