Voting against TARP?

Daily Caller:

According to their reelection campaign ads, Democratic Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper, Frank Kratovil, Dina Titus, Mary Jo Kilroy, and Glenn Nye all voted against the Wall Street bailout. Which is fascinating, since, as FactCheck.org pointed out a few weeks ago, none of them were in office when the bailout was passed.

The bailout, otherwise known as the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP), was passed as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which President Bush signed into law on October 3, 2008. Dahlkemper, Kratovil, Titus, Kilroy, and Nye didn’t take office until January of 2009.

But don’t fear. Our elected officials aren’t liars; they were just talking about a different Wall Street bailout. Andrew Stoddard, who does communications for the Titus campaign, explained that Titus “voted against releasing the second half of the TARP funds.”

Stoddard is referring to when, in January 2009, “President George W. Bush requested the second half of the $700 billion financial-rescue fund on behalf of President-elect Barack Obama,” as the Wall Street Journal reported. The funds were ultimately released.

Political acrobatics of this kind are fairly standard in campaign season: the ability to be in two places at once might in fact be a prerequisite for running for office. Perhaps the frequency of misleading comments like these is why they don’t raise eyebrows in campaigns. Brad Bauman, director of communications for the Kilroy campaign, told The DC that the campaign was dissembling by running such ads.

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While the TARP bailouts were certainly unpopular, they were some of the least objectionable things done by Congress in recent years when you measure their effect. Most of the bank borrowers have paid back the loans and the government has made money on many of them. When the funds were used for auto bailouts, that was a loser of a deal and it continues to be one.

There have been many more bailouts under Obama that were much worse for taxpayers.