Change We Can Be Supicious About

The Wall Street Journal boldly states the situation we are probably facing. 

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s.

Hat tip to intrepid reader Roger.  The WSJ goes on to warn us about the kind of legislation the new regime is likely to pass.  But in the same paper we also get a different story.  Matthew Kaminski tells the story of the first African American governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, who ran on a platform and with a similar strategy to the possibly first African American president.  DP and BO make for a striking comparison. 

They share an image-maker and political guru in David Axelrod, the strategist who told the New York Times Magazine last year that Obama presidential campaign themes were field tested in Massachusetts.

Axelrod's theme was great when it came to campaigning.  How about governing? 

Gov. Patrick's challenge was to turn an autobiographical, pseudo-postideological campaign into a mandate for governing. The transition proved hard and, today, remains incomplete. Having made himself the focus of the election, Mr. Patrick could not easily point to a particular policy agenda of his own. "He won a mandate for a governing style," says Byron Rushing, a House Democrat. "That presents a problem because everyone in their mind has an agenda to go with that style." Jay Kaufman, another representative, adds, "Each decision disappointed someone."…

On the day his most ambitious legislative proposal went down in defeat, the governor was off in New York to sign a $1.35 million book deal. "It was a definitional time," says Mr. Galvin.

Mr. Patrick's poll ratings sank fast, hitting a low with 41% approving of his job performance this April (56% disapproved). "The governor made everyone feel good, then they didn't feel good at all," says Khalil Byrd, his former deputy campaign manager.

I wouldn't count on Massachusetts as a model for the Obama administration.  But there is a reason why post-war America didn't turn out like post-war Europe.  Divided government is the most basic theme of the American system, and it makes it harder for any single vision to be imposed on the whole structure of society and the economy.  President Obama, if he shows up next January, will find that "change" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  Some of those different things will turn out to be mutually irreconcilable. 

At least that is what we can hope.  In so far as the Democrats have a coherent vision, it is to make the United States more like France.  That will probably be as difficult as the problem the French face: trying to revive a sclerotic economy and give hope to a hopeless underclass of unemployable immigrants.  But at least they have good health care, or so we hear. 

Media Myths

A Secret Service investigation into the allegations that someone yelled "kill him!" at a Sarah Palin rally has found no basis to the charge.  The media has run with the story based on the recollections of one man (a reporter for the Scranton Times-Tribune) and was used last night by Barack Obama during the debate.  No one else at the rally recalls hearing it, including the Secret Service detail who is tasked to listen for such threats:

The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled “kill him” when presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s name was mentioned during Tuesday’s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Oabama’s [sic] name a man in the audience shouted “kill him.”

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

“I was baffled,” he said after reading the report in Wednesday’s Times-Tribune.

Yet another great moment in the history of journalism, both for the Scranton Times-Tribune and the national media, which never bothered to check the validity of the story.  Furthermore, will Obama apologize for the smear?  Doubtful.

Tune In To South Dakota Public Radio on Election Night

Yours truly will be sitting on the SDPR election night panel, beginning at 6 pm, and going until ... well, that depends on when the outcomes are in.  It may be early.  If you are out of the five state broadcast area, you can listen online.  I'll have to record it and send it to my mom. 

Affirmative Action Lending for White People

My esteemed Keloland Colleague, Cory Heidelberger, declares that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 , which encouraged home loans to minority persons, is not responsible for the current financial troubles.  I am sure he is right about that.  The roots of the current crisis go back to the 1990's, but they do arise from the same set of issues. 

A quick Lexis-Nexis search of articles ("Minority Lending", Mortgages) produced about a hundred and fifty hits.  Nearly all of them were articles declaring that African Americans were being treated unfairly by the mortgage industry.  What they demonstrate is that tremendous pressure was brought to bear on such institutions to increase lending to minority home seekers.  Steven Malanga, of the Manhattan Institute, has the best piece I have seen on this.  From Real Clear Markets:

In the early 1990s I attended a conference designed to teach journalists the tools of an emerging field known as computer-assisted investigative reporting. One of the hottest sessions of the conference explained how journalists could replicate stories that other papers had done locally using computer tools, including one especially popular project to determine if banks in your community were discriminating against minority borrowers in making mortgages. One newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had already won a Pulitzer Prize for its computer-assisted series on the subject, and others, including the Washington Post and the Detroit Free Press, had also weighed in with their own analysis based on government loan data. Everyone sounded keen to learn if their local banks were guilty, too.

Although academic researchers leveled substantial criticisms against these newspaper efforts (namely, that they relied on incomplete data and did not take into account lower savings rates, higher debt levels, and higher loan defaults rates for many minority borrowers), bank lending to minority borrowers still became an enormous issue—mostly because newspaper reporters and editors in this pre-talk radio, pre-blogging era were determined to make it so. Editorialists called for the government to force banks to end the alleged discrimination, and they castigated federal banking regulators who said they saw no proof of wrongdoing in the data.

Now, maybe African-Americans were being treated unfairly by the mortgage industry, and maybe not.  I couldn't help noticing that none of the articles I read said anything about average default rates for minority vs. non-minority mortgage recipients.  That would tell, better than anything else, whether there was unfairness in lending.  If it was really harder for Blacks to get home loans, their default rate should have been lower.  I suspect that this is not the case. 

What is clear is that the Press and government began to move to affirmative action lending.  This means that the racial disparities were taken as sufficient evidence of racism, and the removal of disparities by any means was taken as a necessary remedy.  What are the results of this kind of policy?

One result is that lenders began aggressively marketing loans to African Americans.  Now if you going to be called a racist when you don't give out enough loans, either you get it just right (which is not the human way), or you err on the side of making bad loans.  This means that a lot of minority home buyers were talked into loans that they couldn't afford.  That resulted in a lot of misery for the people the policy was supposed to help. 

But it also had serious consequences for the banking industry.  Malanga describes how the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston invented Affirmative Action lending.  Bankers were encouraged to revise tradition criteria for lending. 

It instructed banks that an applicant's "lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor" in obtaining a mortgage, even though a mortgage is the biggest financial obligation most individuals will undertake in life. In cases where applicants had bad credit (as opposed to no credit), the Boston Fed told banks to "consider extenuating circumstances" that might still make the borrower creditworthy.

Does all this mean that minority borrowers are to blame for the subprime mortgage crisis?  Of course not.  African Americans represent a significant block of borrowers, but probably not significant enough to trigger a financial breakdown.  But here is the problem: it is very questionable, from an equal protection angle, to have a "two-class" lending regime. 

The new federal standards couldn't just apply to minorities. If they could pay back loans under these terms, then so could the majority of loan applicants. Quickly, in other words, these became the new standards in the industry. In 1999, the New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were easing credit requirements for mortgages it purchased from lenders, and as the housing market boomed, banks embraced these new standards with a vengeance. Between 2004 and 2007, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became the biggest purchasers of subprime mortgages from all kinds of applicants, white and minority, and most of these loans were based on the lending standards promoted by the government [my italics].

So the "dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages" in Cory's citation began a lot earlier than 2006.  It is not "scapegoating" to point this out.  Nor is it "blaming the poor."  The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was not staffed by poor people. 

I have no doubt that greedy lenders were the prime movers behind the subprime crisis.  But being greedy is more or less their job.  The affirmative action lending regime that began in the 1990's put them in a position where they would be called racists if they tried to be even a little bit responsible in their greed.  So what outcome would you expect?

It Keeps Getting Worse, ACORN Edition

Drudge is running the headline about ACORN registering Mickey Mouse to vote.  Jim Hoft has put together a Complete Guide to ACORN Voter Fraud that's worth taking a look at.  Note that most of the states having ACORN issues (except Texas) are swing states.  If I can repeat a question Glenn Reynolds is asking, where's the Justice Department on this?

STILL MORE:  "It is almost inconceivable that Barack Obama should not have been grilled on this –either by his opponent or the media."

SDP @ The Spookies: Quarantine

Ok, so Professor Schaff isn't the ugliest date I ever had.  The two of us, being fans of the zombie genre (which almost rhymes, oddly), took in Quarantine tonight.  I think both of us gave it a general thumbs up, with some reservations. 

Quarantine is a American version of Spanish horror film, [REC].  Judging from the Wikipedia entry on the latter, the American version is a very faithful adaptation.  It is the fourth horror film in recent years (that I can think of) that confines itself to the view of a single camera, held by one of the characters.  It must be irresistible to directors, but it presents obvious challenges to the audience.  Looking at the world from a shaky camera can quickly get annoying, and it's hard to believe that someone would really hang onto a camera anyway, let alone keep filming, when he or she is being chased by zombies, a giant bald lizard thing, or the Blair Witch.  In this case, a film crew is shadowing a group of fire fighters, and arrives on a medical emergency that turns out to be very bad.

SPOILER ALERT!

Quarantine is a pseudo zombie film.  The Zombies aren't reanimated corpses, but living people infected with something that is akin to rabies.  It follows in the footsteps of 28 Days Later, but is at least a hair more plausible.  The infection is rapid, but not immediate, as in that earlier film.  The connection with rabies is good, as rabies is the closest thing in the real world to a zombie infection. 

One odd aspect of the film is that is seems to be trying to create political paranoia, but the attempt backfires.  The characters are quarantined in an apartment building, surrounded by sharp shooters and guys in hazmat suits.  I found that very comforting actually.  When the real zombies show up, I hope our response time is half that short. 

Days of Rage

The media is nearly breathless over reports that McCain/Palin are somehow stoking the flames of hatred.  Will such coverage will also extend to the Obama campaign and the Angry Left?  Take, for instance, an event over the weekend with Obama supporters wearing t-shirts saying "Sarah Palin is a C---" (warning: NSFW and offensive).  Or, those Obama supporters who are throwing Molotov cocktails at McCain supporters.  Not to mention Obama's thuggish tactics at suppressing speech.

Sure, we should take caution over the emergence of an Angry Right, as James Taranto notes.  But it's not a one-way street as the media has treated it.  The Angry Left has done all sorts of things that are beyond-the-pale over the last eight years that they've been given a pass on (see, for example, Death of a President, Checkpoint, I'm Going to Kill the President, this piece by The Guardian, this art exhibit at Columbia College in Chicago, and other "kill Bush" references). 

I would ask the rancorous McCain supporters to calm down a bit.  But we should also demand the Press do its job rather than shill for an Obama victory.

Our First African American President

I am not calling the presidential race just yet, because I honestly don't know who will win.  But I honestly can't see how McCain pulls it out.  The RCP average has Obama up by more than seven points, 49.7 to 42.4.  No recent poll has McCain closer than six points.  Short of some unforeseen big event, or a really massive "Bradley Effect," McCain is going to lose by about a hundred electoral votes. 

Republicans are already busy making excuses.  The biggest one is that the current economic crisis put the election out of reach.  That's plausible, but it ought not to obscure the fact that Republicans were in big trouble already.  The rather amazing thing about the race is that McCain has been competitive for most of it. 

I will note a couple of things about the current campaign that bode well for America.  First, and perhaps paradoxically to conservatives, the fact that America is about to elect the most leftist candidate ever to head a major party is a sign that our foundations are solid.  Why did Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers not sink Obama?  Is it because the connections weren't significant?  No.  The answer is that Americans just aren't that worried about Obama's radical inclinations, assuming he has them.  We trust the system to reign those inclinations in.  Bill Clinton tried to give us Canadian style health care when his party had a majority in Congress.  The only significant result was a Republican majority in both house of Congress.  That's how the system works.  President Obama will be more liberal in his policies than George W., but he won't be radical, or he will be reduced.  Maybe we are naïve to trust in our constitution, but I think not. 

Second, Obama's election will show, beyond any reasonable doubt, that racism has been largely overcome in the political process.  This year it has been the Democrats, and only the Democrats, who have been using the race card.  The Clintons used it against Obama, and thereby probably lost the Black vote permanently.  It's been used recently against McCain/Palin by the Associated Press.  Here is Debra Saunders from the San Francisco Chronicle:

After GOP running mate Sarah Palin criticized Obama for seeing America as "imperfect enough that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their country," an Associated Press story suggested that "her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret."

A racially tinged subtext? Palin may have exaggerated about Obama "palling around" with William Ayers, a founder of the Vietnam War-era Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings across the country including quite possibly a 1970 explosion that left a San Francisco police officer dead. I don't think Obama and Ayers were pals so much as co-believers of a trendy left-leaning and standards-hostile philosophy on education.

And, Ayers is white. So it's hard to figure out how the AP writer construed Palin's remarks as "racially tinged," unless you see race in absolutely everything.

Using race against McCain in the silly way the AP did is just as pernicious as the infamous Willy Horton spot.  To incite racial fears on the part of any group, without cause, is using the race card.  And then there is this piece by Errol Louis in the New York Daily News:

Willie Horton has been summoned back to presidential politics - not as the frightening black rapist but as a legion of shadowy, easily demonized social outsiders.

Obama is being tied to - take your pick - Muslim terrorists, violent white hippies and even uppity "minority homeowners" who somehow, according to GOP spin artists, are among the top villains in wrecking the global economy.

McCain has begun harping on Obama's tenuous connection to William Ayers, an ex-radical who served with Obama on the six-member board of a Chicago charity.

This is noxious numbskullery of the worst kind.  Tying Obama to Ayers may be fair or not, but only in Bizzaro world does it have anything to do with race.  Likewise, pointing out that Congressional attempts to advance minority home ownership had something to do with the subprime loan crisis is perfectly legitimate point, if you care about causes and consequences. 

The truth is that Republicans have been scrupulously respectful of Obama when it comes to race, and that matters.  No doubt there are some Americans who won't vote for Obama because of his skin tone, just as there are a lot of African Americans who are voting for him because of that same reason.  But most of us, obviously, are making our mind up on other grounds, and that matters. 

If you think that Obama is a bad investment, I say I agree, but I also say: trust in the Constitution of the United States.  It survived a civil war.  It will survive this.  And if Obama does win, can we not say that there is no office in the land that is not open to our African American citizens?  Republicans have no inclination to use the race card.  Maybe the Democrats will be forced to abandon it as well. 

If it Doesn't Bleed, it Doesn't Lede

Washington Post:

BAGHDAD — The number of foreign journalists in Baghdad is declining sharply, a media withdrawal that reflects Iraq’s growing stability and the financial strains faced by some news organizations.

In a stark indication of the changing media focus here, the number of journalists traveling with American forces in Iraq has plummeted in the past year. U.S. military officials say they “embedded” journalists 219 times in September 2007. Last month, the number shrank to 39. Of the dozen U.S. newspapers and newspaper chains that maintained full-time bureaus in Baghdad in the early years of the war, only four are still permanently staffed by foreign correspondents. CBS and NBC no longer keep a correspondent in Baghdad year-round.

“It remains important and it remains interesting,” said Alissa J. Rubin, the New York Times’ acting bureau chief in Baghdad. “But what’s in front of us now is almost a static situation. There’s not a clear narrative line. The stories are more complex.”

Veteran journalists say stories about Iraq, where roughly 155,000 U.S. troops are deployed and where the United States spends approximately $10 billion a month, have become tougher to get on the air and into print. News coverage that once centered largely on the U.S. military experience is shifting, like the country itself, to a story of Iraqis taking the halting, often mundane steps toward building their own government.

"No Justice, No Peace?"

Glenn Reynolds:

So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish  tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved -- particularly on the part of the press -- are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it's for anybody. . . .