A Republican who wants to be California's governor is staking his bid on having run the $700-billion federal bank bailout — even as GOP candidates across the nation distance themselves from the highly unpopular program.
As he courts voters, former U. S. Treasury official Neel Kashkari rarely mentions the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) by name. But he says that it staved off another Great Depression, and he cites his work on the program as proof of what he could do in Sacramento.
"You know what we did, and it almost never happens? We got Republicans and Democrats to work together," Kashkari told a Republican women's luncheon at the Palos Verdes Golf Club this week.
His work spanned two administrations, those of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, he noted, and congressional leaders in both parties supported the bailout in 2008.
Similar bipartisan efforts — with elected officials putting the public good first — could reduce unemployment and poverty in California and improve the beleaguered public schools, he told the group.
He is in an awkward spot. In the 2010 elections, GOP politicians who supported the bailout were pilloried. And this year, the issue has been raised against GOP candidates in Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana.
As a result, Republicans are "running as fast as their legs can carry them in the other direction," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
But because Kashkari helped draft the framework for the bailout and then ran the program — work that the first-time candidate cites against criticism that he is a political neophyte — he has no choice except to embrace it, Sabato said.
"If you don't grab the bat and try to hit the ball," he explained, "your opponents are going to grab the bat and beat you over the head with it."
They are trying.
Although nearly all of the state's Democrats in Washington — including then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer — voted for TARP, Democrats began hammering Kashkari about it even before he officially launched his campaign.
"He claims to be a new California Republican, but he … said that bailing out Wall Street banks was the greatest economic policy in history," Dan Newman, a political spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, said in November.
Last month, after Kashkari announced his initial fundraising haul of nearly $1 million, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a GOP gubernatorial rival who has struggled to raise money, tried to turn the TARP connection against him.
He noted that donations had gone to Kashkari from former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — Kashkari's boss in the Bush administration during the bailout — and from people associated with Goldman Sachs, which received TARP funds and is where Kashkari once worked.
"They want to buy our governorship," Donnelly told scores of GOP activists at a Santa Cruz County Republican Central Committee meeting in Scotts Valley in early February.
Donnelly may have been preaching to the choir. Though polls showed voters supported the bailout at the height of the nation's financial crisis, they did an about-face within months, saying that Wall Street was getting relief while Main Street suffered.
Kashkari clearly understands that. He doesn't often use the word "bailout" when speaking to voters, instead describing Washington's efforts as those of "the first responders trying to stabilize the U.S. economy."
He makes a point of sympathizing with voters' anger.
"We were a free-market Republican administration," Kashkari told the GOP women. "We hated the idea of intervening in the markets."
But once the scope of the potential economic damage became clear, he said, there was no choice but to offer aid. It was structured, Kashkari says, in such a way that taxpayers were not harmed.
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