When Democrat Alex Sink announced she was running for governor
recently, the Republican Party instantly branded her a "former banker,"
invoking the ugliness of subprime loans, corporate greed and government
bailouts.
But by raising questions about Sink, the state's chief
financial officer and longtime Bank of America executive, the party
walks a precarious line.
The GOP's own candidate, Attorney
General Bill McCollum, spent 20 years in Congress, all of them on the
committee that oversees banking, and he advocated many of the
industry's issues. When McCollum left Congress in 2001, he became a
lobbyist. His first client: the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.
With
next year's governor's race likely to be overshadowed by a fractured
economy and Florida's crippled housing market, a central question will
be whether Sink or McCollum had any role in promoting or preventing the
crisis.
"Sink has the DNA of a banker and McCollum has acquired
some of the DNA because he represented bankers for so long,'' said Ken
Thomas, an independent banking consultant in Miami who teaches at the
Wharton School of Business. "Neither of them have done big favors for
consumers.'' (story here)
Related posts: