The NRA economy

It's clear, now, why our economy is looking so good these days -- the National Rifle Assoc. vets the Bush administration's economic advisors.

“When I was at Treasury I worked with Ned Gramlich” — the late Federal Reserve governor —“on an initiative to get mortgage lenders to agree to best practices for their subprime loans,” she recalled the other day. But in 2002, she left Treasury for Amherst, Mass., where she joined the faculty of the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts — and promptly lost track of the issue. “I didn’t see the implications, nor did I realize this kind of lending had taken off,” she said.

Then, in the summer of 2006, the White House called. The person the administration had hoped to nominate as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the nation’s primary bank regulator, was suddenly proving unacceptable. (According to the Washington rumor mill, that choice, Diana L. Taylor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s companion and, at the time, New York’s superintendent of banking, was nixed by the National Rifle Association, presumably because of Mayor Bloomberg’s antigun stance.)

Suddenly, the administration needed a new nominee — a Republican who understood the issues surrounding financial institutions, was a known commodity in Washington, and had friends on both sides of the aisles. That describes Ms. Bair, a lifelong moderate Republican who cut her teeth working for Bob Dole, to a T. She took office in June 2006.