HIDALGO, TEXAS — As they race back and forth between Ohio and Texas in advance of their March 4 primary showdown, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are squaring off over who has the answer to the nation's spiraling foreclosure crisis.
Neither presidential rival offers a comprehensive solution, economists say, but that has not inhibited them from touting their populist credentials and tugging at voters' heartstrings.
Hours before he won the Wisconsin primary Tuesday, Obama met with a San Antonio couple trying to save their home, then emphasized his proposal to provide tax credits to struggling homeowners and toughen prosecution of predatory lenders.
Last week, Clinton comforted a Wisconsin woman who had just received her first foreclosure letter. Then Clinton flew on to Ohio, where she promoted her plan for temporary freezes on foreclosures and on adjustable interest rates on sub-prime mortgages.
Officials struggling with the foreclosure issue in both states say the attention is long overdue. "We've been at the epicenter of this disaster for so long we're in the mopping-up phase now," said Jim Rokakis, the treasurer for Cuyahoga County in Ohio, a state wracked with nearly 90,000 repossessions last year -- the sixth-highest rate in the nation.
But some economists caution that neither candidate's foreclosure solution deals with the systemic losses still to come in the faltering housing market and banking industry.
"The conundrum for the candidates is that the threat to homeownership is an emotional issue that every voter can relate to. But there's not much they really can do about it," said L. Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Obama and Clinton are in basic sync about some economic issues, but their approaches on the foreclosure crisis are markedly different.
Obama's solution has been criticized by Clinton and some economists as too marginal to offer real aid to imperiled homeowners. But Clinton's more populist-tinged plan has also been judged faulty and is undermined by her contradictory Senate stands on a Republican-backed bill that passed in 2005, gutting bankruptcy protections for mortgage-holders.
The main thrusts of Obama's cure-all would give a tax credit to struggling homeowners covering 10% of the interest on their mortgages each year and offer $10 billion in bonds to help the middle-class avoid foreclosures. The Illinois senator also would toughen penalties on lenders who draw unsuspecting buyers into usurious mortgages.
