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" CHARLOTTE, N.C. \u2014 One of the hardest sells the president has in his bid to get elected president again is to convince people that repairing the incredible damage done by the pillaging of the nation&amp;#039;s wealth by the thimbleriggers in the suits is more than a four-year job. Bill Clinton made that point so eloquently in his speech here on Wednesday night, when he said that the task \u2014 of fixing everything that had been wrecked, and counting the cost of everything that had been stolen, in only four years \u2014 was a task that would have been &amp;quot;beyond me or any of my predecessors,&amp;quot; that it was easy to forget that he&amp;#039;d been the guy who signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which ultimately rang the dinner bell for the assembled wolverines. (Let us stop for a moment and consider this, too: Bill Clinton got up in public and admitted that there might be something beyond his abilities as a president. Elizabeth, this is the big one. I&amp;#039;m comin&amp;#039; to join you, honey.) Implicit in that argument is that, upon taking office, the president was confronted with an economic crisis that was worse than he thought it was. My basic question always has been: How was that possible? How could they possibly not have known in January of 2009 how bad the damage really was? I mean, Bob Rubin, who was advising the damn transition team, was certainly in a position to know the extent of the damage, since he probably had almost everyone who caused it on speed-dial. Tim Geithner was right in the middle of all the maneuvering that produced the Bush administration bailout plan, and he&amp;#039;d been in on the meetings in which Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke scared the everlasting aspirations out of Congress and &amp;quot;forced&amp;quot; the investment banks to accept all that sweet government cash. He had to have a good idea of how deep the trouble was. It seemed to be that, if they didn&amp;#039;t know, it was either because they didn&amp;#039;t want to know, or they didn&amp;#039;t want to country to know. Simple ignorance still doesn&amp;#039;t seem to be a plausible explanation. At the time, Congressman Barney Frank, whose farewell speech was moved to Thursday night here, as the scheduling got scrambled, was the chairman of the House Financial Services, and he sat in all those meetings in which the nation&amp;#039;s financial situation was described in terms usually used by John of Patmos. So, I asked him the other day if people had simply lied about how bad it really was, lied to each other, to the incoming president, and, ultimately, to the country. &amp;quot;No, no, that wasn&amp;#039;t it,&amp;quot; Frank told me. &amp;quot;They were surprised, as were most people, including the Bush people, at how damaged the economy really was. People didn&amp;#039;t know. The economy, you know, you can&amp;#039;t pick it up and look at it under a microscope. People were more depressed, the rot was deeper than people could see. Paulson did not realize how bad it really was. It became clear in January and February [of 2009] when the economy was not responding. A lot of this is psychological. You can&amp;#039;t physically see it. We realized that people were more frozen and damaged, and assets were even weaker than people thought. &amp;quot;What Paulson said was, &amp;#039;If we don&amp;#039;t do X, they&amp;#039;ll be a collapse.&amp;#039; So we did X, and it wasn&amp;#039;t enough. It staved off collapse, but it didn&amp;#039;t bring things back. Nobody realized how badly things had been weakened,&amp;quot; Frank continued. &amp;quot;I had a bumper sticker I wanted to put out in 2010: THINGS THAT WOULD HAVE SUCKED WORSE WITHOUT ME. I never used it.&amp;quot; The fact is that the crookedness began long before even George W. Bush took office. There was no Big Bang in this universe of corruption. It created itself, one rigged deal at a time, ever since the country forgot what a truly terrible idea &amp;quot;deregulation&amp;quot; of the financial system of this country truly is. And the really odd thing, as Chris Hayes pointed out on MSNBC on Wednesday night, is that nobody on the podium here, except for Elizabeth Warren, seems to be truly channelling the righteous anger that should burn in this country for at least as long as those avaricious bastards spent stealing it. COMING LATER TONIGHT FROM CHARLOTTE: Tom Junod and Charles P. Pierce on Obama CLICK HERE FOR THE POLITICS BLOG&amp;#039;S COMPLETE COVERAGE FROM THE DNC, PLUS FOLLOW LIVE SPEECH ANALYSIS WITH @ESQPOLITICS AND @TOMJUNOD "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15680/barney-frank-economic-collapse-2009-12453682/>