Treasuring the truth

Monday evening, I went to the IU College Republicans call-out meeting. Of course, I had no intention of joining the party.

But I had heard that a special guest, ex-congressman Mike Sodrel, would be there to greet students.

I thought it would be worth my time to become a little more familiar with the man who represented me on Capitol Hill for two years.

Knowing that “Millionaire Mike,” as hostiles have dubbed him, would likely be doing a bit of speechifying now that he’s getting close to the last month of his fourth campaign against his old foe, Democratic congressman Baron Hill, I suspected it would be the perfect opportunity to size him up.

Sitting directly to Mike’s left, I was certainly able to get a measure of the man. His large physique seemed to keep expanding, right over the small boundaries that were the armrests separating our two chairs.

But by the end of the night’s festivities, two other observances had struck me as a lot more noteworthy than Mr. Sodrel.

First, the College Republicans themselves seemed like a nice bunch of people. No one gave me the evil eye when I sneaked into the meeting or even when I made a disturbance by not clapping at the conservative punch lines.

Second, Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock,  who delivered the keynote address, told a big untruth.

He claimed the current subprime mortgage crisis was caused by a Democratic Congress. According to him, we should wonder why investment banks issued subprime mortgages – high interest loans to individuals with sketchy credit histories – to people they knew would never be able to pay them back.

For starters, most subprime mortgages were issued not by investment firms but by ordinary banks. Still, Mr. Mourdock told me, along with the 60 other event attendees, that a Democratic Congress set the ball rolling on this crisis when it made Lehman Brothers and other collapsing financial giants believe all Americans had the right to own their own homes, something which could apparently only be achieved through subprime lending.

I might not be an economist, but a little bit of logic is all you need to see through that one. Anyone who claims powerful Wall Street financial institutions were made to “feel bad” is clearly deceived about how incentives work.

Experts recognize that when banks made these loans, they planned to immediately sell them to investors – principally familiar names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

And when subprimes’ true values were finally recognized, these same investors were caught owning too much of the now worthless investment and their stock value tanked.
That’s because they tried to make a profit and lost big, not because the CEOs of these investment firms, some of whom make more than $27 million per year, were guilted into handing every American a home like their own.

Perhaps Mr. Mourdock really thought he was telling the truth to a group of young people. Perhaps his story wasn’t a cheap grab for votes. Perhaps. But I’m banking on a different answer.