Turns out, our initial post “Freddie, Fannie and Barack” was erroneous. We’ve struck out the incorrect sections from our earlier post.
We said originally that Obama was the fourth largest recipient of donations from troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That’s wrong. Our post was drawn from data from the Center for Responsive Politics’ Web site, OpenSecrets.org. But the data we used were incomplete.
We talked to a spokesperson from the Center for Responsive Politics who told us that looking at all election cycles since 1989 (the first year for which CRP has data), Barack Obama is in fact the second-largest recipient of contributions from employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, their unemployed spouses and dependent children and both of the FMs’ political action committees.
According to CRP, Obama’s total contributions from the FMs work out to $126,349. Of that sum, $6,000 comes from the FMs’ political action committees, and the rest from individuals who work for one of the two companies. Obama’s FM contributions account for about 0.03 percent of his total contributions to date. McCain’s FM haul is a smaller $21,550, all from individuals. That’s about 0.01 percent of his total contributions. We stand by our doubts that either candidate will be much swayed by numbers of this size.