like atrios, i think palin's statement about fannie mae and freddie mac suggests that she really has no idea what is going on with those companies and the housing crisis. i also don't think her statement was a "gaffe."
a gaffe is when a politician misspeaks or makes a mistake while speaking. gaffe's don't actually reveal much about the candidate other than the fact that he/she is speaking a lot and being recorded all the time. anyone in the spotlight that is shining on all of the major candidates is going to make a ton of stupid mistakes. that's just human nature.
but this is not a case of palin mixing up words or the like. yesterday, palin told a crowd about a major event in national news and got her facts completely backwards. mortgage finance companies did not get into trouble because "[t]hey’ve gotten too big and too expensive to taxpayers." they were private companies that didn't get any taxpayer money. that is, until the government takeover announced this week. private companies failed and the government, this week, announced that it will take them over to rescue them.
palin apparently thinks that the companies' collapse is due to a failure of government when actually it is a failure of an entity that the government privatized decades ago. if they hadn't been privatized the problem might not have happened at all. and, based upon its actions this week, a reversal of that privatization (i.e. nationalization) is what the bush administration thinks is the solution.
i wonder if palin's confusion is not ideological. to members of the extreme right, there are no such things are market failures. to them, every problem with the market is a government failure. when she heard about the collapse, she probably just assumed that they were government entities because that's how she was inclined to think about a failure. but that's an explanation for her mistake, not an excuse. the bottom line is that the housing crisis is possibly the biggest economic issue facing the country right now. we deserve to have leaders who know what the hell is going on.
