George Will is an eloquent spokesman for the conservative cause and has never been more riveting than he was in this speech. I recommend everyone watch it.
He is diplomatic when he points out how much Bush anticipated the policies of Obama and the Democrats.
Scott Brown looks very good as the election goes into its last day in Massachusetts. He is a great retail politician and, I think, a coming star in the GOP. What has been behind his meteoric rise in Mass politics ?
Mitt Romney’s people.
Largely overlooked in assessing Brown’s prospects: the hidden hand of Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor headlined at a fundraiser for Brown last October. And Romney has helped Brown raise money outside the state as well. “I know Scott and how determined he is to win. I’ve campaigned for him, raised money on his behalf, and we’re doing all we can to help him over the finish line,” Romney wrote supporters last Monday. Brown, 50, raised $1.3 million that day.
The Brown campaign is filled with Romney associates.
Ever since he entered the race to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, Brown has been counseled by members of the Shawmut Group, a Boston-based consulting firm that acts as the Romney political brain trust in exile. Among the many Romney disciples running Brown’s campaign are Beth Myers, the campaign manager of Romney’s presidential run; Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s chief spokesman; Peter Flaherty, Romney’s “go-to-guy for conservatives”; and Rob Cole, Romney’s 2008 deputy chairman manager. Beth Lindstrom, another player in Romney World, is working as Brown’s campaign manager. Lindstrom’s ties to Romney go back years; she started working with him in the Massachusetts State House as director of consumer affairs.
The next decade, if the Republicans are smart, is going to see a merger of the libertarian approach to domestic policy with traditional Republican national security policy. Bush’s failure was the spending and the inept handling of Iraq after the invasion. A lot of the latter was the fault of Bremer and the former of Dennis Hastert. Still, the president gets the credit when things go well and the blame when they don’t.
The Scott Brown story is a big plus for Romney.
More from a mom in Maine who drove to Boston for the rally.
My prediction: If Brown wins, it will be because the average person tuned out the liberal media and the negative ads and listened to Scott Brown himself. They liked what they heard — key messages on stopping health care, keeping us safe from terrorists, and not raising taxes. If this happens, it will be reminiscent of another politician who had the ability to talk directly to the people — Ronald Reagan. But Scott Brown, as good a guy as he seems to be, is no Ronald Reagan. He has some commonsense instincts, but if he wants to stay in power from super-blue MA, he will have to stick it to the Republican leadership more than once to “prove” himself. On what issues he will do this is anybody’s guess. Not unlike Obama, many people are making Scott Brown into what they want him to be, but he will be his own person no doubt.
I disagree. Reagan was told 100 times that he had to modify some of his positions to be a viable candidate. The times are different now. Brown is genuine and it would be a mistake for him to start to trim. His abortion amendment is enough. That established his with the social conservatives. His task now is all economic and populist.
UPDATE: John Kerry is now smearing the Brown campaign as “out of state” and dangerous. I’m sure they look dangerous to Kerry.
UPDATE #2: Eleanor Holmes Norton, elected by DC which does NOT qualify for a voting member of Congress, says the health care bill will be pushed through no matter what. And those pesky voters think they matter. Huh !
UPDATE: Obama has changed his mind and will put off health care until February. Wow ! If that’s true, there are some Senators who will plucking flak out of their asses for weeks over this and now they get blindsided. Way to go, big guy !
There are lots of post mortems going on this morning. Did the Republicans do the best they could to stop this bill in the Senate ? I think they had a terrible problem and probably did the best they could. They did delay passage until a lot of the public got a good view of the sausage factory. There is another question. Did the Republicans leave the door open by failing to produce an alternative the past 15 years since Clinton failed ?
The choices that they made, or didn’t make, across the last fifteen years are what made all the difference. Between the defeat of Clintoncare and the election of Barack Obama, the Republicans had plenty of chances to take ownership of the health care issue and pass a significant reform along more free-market, cost-effective lines. They didn’t. The system deteriorated on their watch instead. And now they’re suffering the consequences.
There are others who think the bill may still fail in the House but let’s look at the question about the past 15 years. The left, of course, thinks they made a huge blunder. I don’t accept his premise.
At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can’t know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign.
What ??? I don’t see that at all.
What about Douthat’s charge the Republicans missed a chance for an alternative ?
I think he is wrong. The Republican alternative was always The HMO. In 1973, Nixon signed a bill making HMOs mandatory as an option for all businesses with more than 25 employees.
In more recent years, “managed competition” was the model with other alternatives to HMOs created, like PPOs. These organizations enlist doctors and hospitals who agree to follow rules, chiefly rules about utilization. They may also, especially recently, include discounted prices for services. Those discounts have gotten quite large in recent years so that, in California, a state with heavy managed care, most medical groups were insolvent in 2008. It wasn’t just California as predatory practices left many doctors high and dry.
Managed competition was an aggressive strategy to control costs. It didn’t work. Why ?
The basic failure of all medical insurance the past 30 years is the inclusion of routine care making “health insurance” into “prepaid care.” People would know better than to buy auto insurance that included routine maintenance in the policy benefits. Why ? Because, instinctively, they understand moral hazard. They know that, if your insurance covered oil changes and the damage that might be incurred for failing to change oil, people would be less likely to take good care of the oil in their cars. Not everyone. But enough. Why doesn’t everyone buy one of those home maintenance policies ? Have you tried to get anything fixed under one ?
Now, it looks as though we may get a chance to see if the Democrats’ way is any more effective than the Republican way. I don’t think it will be but it does provide lots of jobs for Democrat functionaries. At least until the money runs out.
UPDATE: The Detroit News has a piece today on the Obama agenda and the possibility that a Depression could result. They make points similar to those I have been worried about.
The concerns of the majority of American citizens with out-of-control spending do not impress the left. They advise Obama and Congress to ignore those pesky voters.
MAJORITY STILL MISGUIDED ON ECONOMIC PRIORITIES…. The polling has been remarkably consistent on this all year. And it irks me every time.
Americans are more concerned with lowering the massive budget deficit than boosting the ailing economy, according to a new national poll.
Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNBC survey released Friday morning say President Barack Obama and Congress should worry more about keeping the budget deficit down even if that means delaying the economic recovery. That’s 23 points higher than the 33 percent who feel boosting the economy should be the top priority, even if that means larger deficits now and in the future.
This continues to be hopelessly backwards. Given the precarious state of the economy and widespread concerns about unemployment, common sense suggests concerns over the deficit should wane. But all of the recent polling suggests a majority of Americans really do care more about deficit reduction than growing the economy and creating jobs.
The left is still convinced of the efficacy of the command economy in spite of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the evolution of Communist China into a semi-capitalist economy.
They are convinced, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that Roosevelt saved the country from the Depression by spending. The concept that the New Deal was the cause of the Depression is totally alien.
This is not just a repudiation of Amity Schlaes book, The Forgotten Man, but also new scholarship from serious academics.
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”
“Today” was 2004 when the Congress was still in the hands of Republicans. There are many things that Congress, and the Bush Administration, did wrong but no one would have predicted that the exact same policies these scholars condemned would again be enacted only five years later.
Another example that is never discussed is the 1920 recession. The fact that this recession was as severe as the 1929 crash is almost never discussed.
The end of World War I caused the federal budget to decline from $18.5 billion in 1919 to $6.4 billion in 1920. Although this decline in budgetary stimulus required an increase in investment and spending by the private sector, Congress raised taxes on individuals and corporations, while the Federal Reserve Bank restricted credit by raising its discount rate for member banks from 4.75 percent to 7 percent by 1920. Unemployment rose from 4.0 percent in 1919 to 11.9 percent in 1921, but subsided to 7.6 percent in 1922 and 3.2 percent in 1923. The recession contributed to the failure or merger of 2,024 banks (6.5 percent of the total) by 1925.The economy’s industrial and commercial sectors revived after 1921, but agriculture did not. Farm prices dropped sharply as world output rose after the war, and US farmers responded by overproduction, which created surpluses that drove commodity prices progressively downward through the 1920s. Farm income dropped from 15 percent of national output in 1920 to 9 percent in 1928; 454,866 owner-managed farms disappeared in the 1920s, and the farm population decreased by 3,000,000. The agricultural depression led to the closure of 5,400 rural banks during the decade.
The agricultural depression is usually emphasized in any discussion of the 1920s. My own family were farmers but left the farm during that decade. The fact is that national prosperity was also contributing as agricultural productivity soared with mechanization of farming and new technology with fertilizers and the systems of crop rotation.
What is almost never discussed is why the 1920 recession ended so quickly. Thousands of banks failed yet, by 1923 employment was back to normal even though a million men had been demobilized as the war ended in 1918. What happened ?
There is a good deal of speculation in the economic literature but the conclusions vary. What is clear, though, is that President Harding and VP Coolidge did NOT do what Hoover and Roosevelt did after the 1929 crash.
The 1920-21 deflation contains another striking feature. Not only was it sharp, it was large relative to the accompanying decline in real product. The ratio of the percentage decline in the GNP deflator for 1920-21 to the percentage decline in real GNP is 2.6 using the Department of Commerce figures, 3.7 using the Balke and Gordon data, and 6.3 using the Romer data. By contrast, during 1929-30, the first year of the Great Depression, the GNP deflator declined by 2.7 percent and real GNP by 9.4 percent, for a ratio of 0.3. The ratios of the percentage decline in GNP prices to the percentage decline in real GNP for 1930-31, 1931-32, 1932-33, and 1937-38, the other Great Depression years in which real GNP declined, were 1.0, 0.9, 1.2, and 0.3, respectively, all well below the 1920-21 figures.
The 1920 recession was more severe than the 1929 crash in its effect on prices and wages.
The contraction then became severe. By the year’s end, industrial production had fallen 25.6 percent below its January 1920 peak and bottomed out at 32.6 percent below its January 1920 level in July 1921, the general business trough. Wholesale prices were 42.9 percent below their May 1920 peak by July 1921. Industrial production had fallen by 32.6 percent in eighteen months, wholesale prices by 42.9 percent in fourteen months. The deflation eliminated more than 70 percent of the rise in wholesale prices associated with World War I.
In one year, 70% of the inflation of WWI was eliminated !
Friedman and Schwartz [1963, 205-39] attribute the severe phase of the 1920-21 recession and its attending deflation to monetary restraint. Monetary policy was expansive throughout World War I, including the period of U.S. neutrality. Policy remained expansive during most of 1919, even though by summer an inflationary boom was underway. The Federal Reserve was pegging interest rates at a low level using its loan discount rate in order to accommodate the Treasury’s funding of the war debt. The Fed also had an interest in protecting commercial bank portfolios, which contained substantial quantities of war bonds and loans secured by war bonds.
Monetary policy began to shift in December 1919, then changed markedly in January 1920.
What happened in 1920 ? There was an election.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s discount rate, which had been pegged at 4 percent since April 1919, was raised to 4.75 percent in December 1919, to 6 percent in January 1920, and to 7 percent in June 1920. Similar discount rate increases were made at the other Federal Reserve Banks.
This was still Wilson’s Progressive administration but Wilson was disabled by a stroke. Colonel House and Mrs Wilson were basically running the administration. The 1918 election returned control of the Senate to Republicans, who picked up seven seats. The war ended with the Armistice a week later. The Republican Senate is often blamed for the failure to ratify the League of Nations although Wilson’s failure to compromise on some issues is also to blame. Its influence on monetary policy is usually ignored.
There is much speculation about why the recession was so severe but little about why it ended so quickly.
Austrian School economists and historians argue that the 1921 recession was a necessary market correction, required to engineer the massive realignments required of private business and industry following the end of the War. Historian Thomas Woods argues that President Harding’s laissez-faire economic policies during the 1920/21 recession, combined with a coordinated aggressive policy of rapid government downsizing, had a direct influence (mostly through intentional non-influence) on the rapid and widespread private-sector recovery.[11] Woods argued that, as there existed massive distortions in private markets due to government economic influence related to World War I, an equally massive “correction” to the distortions needed to occur as quickly as possible to realign investment and consumption with the new peace-time economic environment.
That is the last paragraph of the article. It may be the most important. Harding cut government spending and let the private economy alone to recover. It did so completely in one year. Ten years later, Hoover, followed by Roosevelt, enacted progressive prescriptions and the Great Depression followed. Now, we seem to be on the same path.
A Rasmussen poll suggests that the tea party movement is gaining strength. Right now, it outpolls Republicans among all but Republican self-identified voters, and isn’t far behind with them.
In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.
Obviously, if you combine the tea party and Republican votes, you have a plurality.
Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Tea Party comes out on top. Thirty-three percent (33%) prefer the Tea Party candidate, and 30% are undecided. Twenty-five percent (25%) would vote for a Democrat, and just 12% prefer the GOP.
These may be independents or they may simply be people who are uninterested in politics. What it does show is that the tea party brand is powerful, even among the least likely voters. They may also be those who do not read newspapers, a major source of Democrat propaganda.
The generic Congressional ballot shows the Republicans well ahead, suggesting that those supporting the tea party movement in principle are going to vote Republican.
Real Clear Politics tries to decipher the polls and concludes This is because “policy preference” questions or questions involving other political figures can ultimately skew the result of a later horse race question, by unintentionally leading readers to view the horse race in a certain frame. . The other polls tend to ask a list of questions about specific policies that may skew the party identification with some voters. Close to elections, this is often called “push polling” and it may help to win elections but it also make pollsters miss trends.
A second major factor is that Republicans don’t have much faith in party leaders and consider them out of touch. I would not be that charitable. I think they have entirely different goals from most voters. They want to get elected. We want them to govern responsibly. A weakness of democracy is the tension between those goals.
The tea party people I have met, and I have attended tea party events in two cities, are largely libertarian and have little patience with the pandering behavior of most politicians. The best solution, I believe, is for the tea party movement to take over as much of the Republican Party as possible before the next election. That means going to meetings and running for local offices, including the local party committees. This means a lot of boring work; I know because I’ve been there, but it is the key to reviving this party and, possibly, saving the country from decline and debt repudiation.
There is an interesting post today on Powerline from a professor at Hillsdale College. I have attended a couple of Tea Party rallies and am convinced this is a major movement in the country. They were not organized by the Republican Party or Fox News and they are largely libertarian in philosophy. I can’t even recall seeing an anti-abortion sign at one of them. That’s not to say that the attendees are not social conservatives. I just think that financial and tax issues trump all that right now. Here are some of the statements from that piece that particularly struck me.
However, the Guardian, a left wing newspaper in Britain, is alarmed at this phenomenon.
Indeed, to examine the impact of both Palin and Bachmann is to see an America split firmly into two different worlds. The first is a liberal one where such politicians make outlandish comments that become the butt of jokes on the Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. The other is one where Palin and Bachmann are the victims of a liberal media that hates its own country. “For their supporters, attacking Palin and Bachmann actually gives them the proof that they are the victims that they already believe themselves to be,” said Bowler. To the conservative mind-set, these women are truth-tellers who are viciously attacked precisely because of the validity of the message that they are carrying.
Yes, it is alarming. Unfortunately, there is no similar movement in Britain. Instead, Labour voters seem to be joining a real fascist party.
Back in early September, I attended the annual meeting of the American Political Science Convention, which was held — for the first time — outside the United States in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
One of the panels I attended had as its focus the first eight months of the Obama administration and that administration’s prospects. Those on this particular panel were for the most part on the right, and in an utterly sober fashion they discussed the stimulus bill, the likelihood that the Democrats would pass a health care bill, and the prospects of the two parties in the 2010 midterm elections.
I was struck by one thing. No one even mentioned the tea-party movement and the explosions that had taken place at town meetings throughout the country in August.
So I asked why no one had mentioned it, and one political scientist — an exceedingly distinguished and astute student of presidential elections — responded that the tea-party phenomenon was, indeed, strange. It had, he noted, no institutional support. Nothing more was said. That was the beginning and the end of the panel’s discussion of this phenomenon.
Here is a political science meeting by the national association of scholars in this field. There is no mention of the Tea Party movement. Is there a better example of the failure of academic institutions to understand the country ?
He then links to an earlier post on a previous example of a spontaneous mass movement in American history.
In the early 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited Jacksonian America, he was taken aback by much of what he encountered. Nothing impressed him more, however, than the demonstrated capacity of the Americans to form private associations for public purposes.
This phenomenon – illegal in Tocqueville’s France and rare on the continent of Europe, even today – amazed him. He was particularly struck by the political consequences of the Americans’ confident practice of what he called “the art of association.” For, as he discovered, opposition had sprung up to the so-called Tariff of Abominations outside the existing political parties.
This opposition was especially emphatic in the South. But, in a fashion that seemed spontaneous, organizations had been independently formed in every district of the country, and then they had joined together in a great network to bring pressure upon Congress.
Tocqueville did not express an opinion regarding the justice or wisdom of this movement. What interested and excited him was simply its existence. For it proved that, in a great commercial democracy established in an extended territory, civic agency was a genuine possibility. It proved that the residents of the United States of America were citizens, not subjects, and it demonstrated that the condition that he called “soft despotism” was not the only possibility afforded by liberal democracy.
The tariff is explained at the link but it does not mention the Great Awakening, which is often described as religious in nature. The first Great Awakening occurred in colonial times and is thought to have contributed to the Revolution. The Second Great Awakening is still considered to have been religious but it led to the abolition movement and, eventually, to the Civil War. To de Tocqueville, however, the crisis of the tariff was at least a part of the movement. Henry Clay, in an attempt to defeat a protective tariff sponsored by New England manufacturers, added provisions that harmed them as well as the South, which he represented. The resulting Tariff of Abominations was passed and signed by President John Quincy Adams in spite of reservations by all the parties. It led to Adams’ defeat by Jackson in 1828 and to the Nullification Crisis of 1832. There is an interesting parallel between the 1828 tariff, which was signed by Adams in spite of the fact that it hated by almost everyone, punishing both northern manufacturers and southern agriculture, and the present health care bill. The Cap and Trade bill is also widely hated although it has not yet gotten much attention.
What remains remarkable, however, is the fact pointed out by the political scientist mentioned above. The Tea-Party movement lacks institutional support. Back in the early 1990s, when Hillary Clinton announced her proposal for a federal takeover of healthcare, the insurance companies mounted a campaign against it.
This time, the Democrats have squared everything with the special interests. The National Association of Manufacturers quickly climbed on board, eager to free its members from having to provide health care insurance for their members’ employees. The pharmaceutical companies did a deal with Obama aimed at protecting their short-term interests, as did the American Medical Association. The American Association of Retired Persons — which purports to represent the interests of the elderly, but which has business interests of its own — was bought outright, and the same thing can be said with regard to the health insurance companies. The industrial labor unions are similarly on board.
Indeed, everyone appears to have been taken care of . . . except, of course, for the ordinary citizens who will be subject to the new regime. There is no one to stand up for them. The Republican Party lacks the requisite votes, and everyone else has been bought.
This is what makes the comparison so apt. No one is standing up for the people except themselves.
In the circumstances, it is heartening that Americans still know how to stand up for themselves. With continued cooperation from Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama, the Tea-Party movement may find itself blazing the trail for a partisan realignment that no one in the Republican Party yet has the wit to imagine.
What the leaders of the latter need to be taught is something akin to the rhetoric articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 — for it nicely summarizes the argument made before almost every major party realignment in our history.
Whether the Republicans will manage to clamber aboard this train before it leaves the station is a question still to be answered.
UPDATE: There are some strange things going on in the final vote count. Maybe it’s not over. They sure got Owens sworn in fast. What happens if he lost the election ?
Well, Hoffman lost but not by much. Dede Scozzafava managed to sink him by endorsing the Democrat. So much for Newt Gingrich’s counsel. He had several factors against him. He apparently did not live in the district although it is huge. I suspect his business is in the district but that was not enough. He also did poorly on local issues in a newspaper interview. That could be a phony issue if the paper was supporting someone else but this was not a good moment.
Regarding the proposed rooftop highway across the top of the district linking Watertown to Plattsburgh, Mr. Hoffman said only that he was open to studying the idea that has been around for years and will require federal financial assistance to complete.
Mr. Hoffman had no opinion about winter navigation and widening the St. Lawrence Seaway with their potential environmental damage. He was not familiar with the repercussions of a proposed federal energy marketing agency for the Great Lakes, which could pay for Seaway expansion contrary to district interests.
A flustered and ill-at-ease Mr. Hoffman objected to the heated questioning, saying he should have been provided a list of questions he might be asked. He was, if he had taken the time to read the Thursday morning Times editorial raising the very same questions.
That was lame. He is also not that impressive being interviewed on TV. I can see how the locals would resent the effort to make the campaign about national issues. Jobs and spending and deficits are universal but he seems to have done a poor job with the local paper.
Coming to Mr. Hoffman’s defense, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who accompanied the candidate on a campaign swing, dismissed regional concerns as “parochial” issues that would not determine the outcome of the election.
Ouch ! Armey should know better than that.
Here is a post by a Hoffman supporter on the election. He makes some sweeping claims that may not bear out. A few commenters add to the discussion, then the usual trolls appear. You can spot the lefties by their use of the obscene derogatory “teabagger.” Once you see that word, you know they do not mean well and anything they say is spin.
The Virginia election was a real triumph for the GOP with the whole top slate plus many down ballot races being won.
I think it is worthwhile to note that McDonnell campaigned on the issues of spending, taxes and regulation while his opponents, including the Washington Post, got hysterical about his social views. I think that is the right approach and I think the less said by candidates about social issues next year, the better.
New Jersey turned out better than many expected. Christie was criticized before the election for refusing to rule out tax increases and by resisting the property tax issue in debates. Since he won, I guess he was right.
In California, I had some hopes for the special election in the Bay Area where Garamendi was running for CA 10 against David Harmer and won in a low turnout election. That has been a safe seat for the Democrats for years but hope springs eternal.
Turnout was estimated to be about 39 percent – “an exceptionally high figure” for a special congressional election in California, said Steve Weir, clerk-recorder for Contra Costa County, where nearly 70 percent of the district’s voters live. The district includes parts of Alameda, Solano and Sacramento counties.
The vote totals, as pointed out by a commenter at Patterico, suggest that Republicans turned out well but there just aren’t enough of them in that district.
In Tucson, the tea party movement had some success in ousting one of the left wing city council members. One has been counted as lost and the other is close. That would be a significant achievement.
Tea parties and a testy national mood aside, Ward 3 incumbent Karin Uhlich is holding on to a narrow lead over Ben Buehler-Garcia.
Nina Trasoff was trailing Republican Steve Kozachik, leaving both races too close to call, with thousands of early ballots still to be counted.
Well, 2010 is coming.
Last year, I posted a lengthy piece on the origins of the mortgage industry collapse and the role Congress played. I have since closed the post to comments to reduce spam. A reader found it and sent me an e-mail about a Frontline piece that is apparently full of lies. UPDATE: I should change this to say that it is not lying that is the problem but the inability of the writers to see the merits of a free market and a determination that only regulation, and by extension a command economy, can safely run the financial markets. Derivatives were not the problem. The problem was the inability to estimate risk because the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were pushing the envelope with government guarantees to their risky loans. Every step which should have warned of the risk was failing because the parties saw huge profits and, at the end of the day, a guarantee by the Treasury that nobody could lose. Moral hazard was rampant.
Typically, it blames the Bush people (actually Greenspan and shows Bush giving him a medal) even though the problems were begun under Clinton and Congress was the chief villain. Here is an example of Congress on the job. Note the tactic of hiding incriminating videos by claiming copyright violation. At least one is still visible.
Rush Limbaugh discussed it on his show and there is a link to the PBS show.
Ladies and gentlemen, they had to do what they were told. The federal government created policies that made them make these loans to people who couldn’t pay them. That’s what the subprime mortgage crisis is all about. The architects of that are Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and a whole bunch of other minor bit players. ACORN’s involved, ACORN’s running around hassling banks if they don’t make loans to people. So now, after following mandated policy, federal law, the Community Redevelopment Act under Carter, it was put on steroids in the late nineties with Clinton and the bunch and that thing forced the banks to make these loans. And so these banks, after following orders, are now being blamed for the problem.
My point in my post was that both parties contributed and those who tried to warn or to rein in the out-of-control Fannie and Freddie were punished or warned of punishment. Ms Born was warning but she did not see that the real risk was government intervention in markets (Fannie/Freddie) not deregulation.
Or consider the experience of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the GOP’s bright young lights who decided in the 1990s that Fan and Fred needed more supervision. As he held town hall meetings in his district, he soon noticed a man in a well-tailored suit hanging out amid the John Deere caps and street clothes. Mr. Ryan was being stalked by a Fannie lobbyist monitoring his every word.
On another occasion, he was invited to a meeting with the Democratic mayor of Racine, which is in his district, though he wasn’t sure why. When he arrived, Mr. Ryan discovered that both he and the mayor had been invited separately — not by each other, but by a Fannie lobbyist who proceeded to tell them about the great things Fannie did for home ownership in Racine.
When none of that deterred Mr. Ryan, Fannie played rougher. It called every mortgage holder in his district, claiming (falsely) that Mr. Ryan wanted to raise the cost of their mortgage and asking if Fannie could tell the congressman to stop on their behalf. He received some 6,000 telegrams. When Mr. Ryan finally left Financial Services for a seat on Ways and Means, which doesn’t oversee Fannie, he received a personal note from Mr. Raines congratulating him. “He meant good riddance,” says Mr. Ryan.
Yes, this was a bipartisan scandal and PBS (government funded, of course) tries to avoid the truth and blame Bush and Greenspan. Why not ? Everyone else that is government funded does. Greenspan missed the impending crisis but the PBS program missed it too.
The LA Times today has a story about Obama’s fall in the polls, but why is this the headline ?
Obama is fast losing white voters’ support
Since whites constitute, depending on your opinion of whether Latinos are white (I think so), the vast majority of the population, any significant drop in Obama’s poll numbers would be a drop in white voters’ support. Blacks, who constitute 13% of the population, are unlikely to change their support. Whites, including Hispanics, are 80% of the population and so will always be the group most represented in polls. Why the headline ?
Among white Democrats, Obama’s job approval rating has dropped 11 points since his 100-days mark in April, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. It has dropped by 9 points among white independents and whites over 50, and by 12 points among white women — all groups that will be targeted by both parties in next year’s midterm elections.
“While Obama has a lock on African Americans, his support among white voters seems to be almost in a free fall,” said veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse.
OK, that’s fair.
But the drop in support among whites also comes as some conservatives have stoked controversies that have the potential to further erode Obama’s standing among centrists — including some controversies that resulted from White House stumbles.
One such episode came to a head Sunday when Van Jones, Obama’s green jobs czar, resigned after a week of criticism over past inflammatory statements and for signing onto conspiracy theories questioning whether the U.S. government played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. A White House official acknowledged Sunday that Jones had been vetted less rigorously than other officials.
Still fair.
In another episode, some conservatives have criticized a White House dinner invitation issued to the lead lawyer in the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuits that have forced the government to disclose Bush-era interrogation techniques. The lawyer was invited to an event for the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.
That’s a weird story and I have never heard of this. If I haven’t heard of it, I doubt many others have either.
These controversies have followed conspiracy theories that the president was born overseas and is ineligible to hold office, and that his true religion is Islam — false rumors that some Democrats worry could be affecting the public’s view of the president and his party.
That’s a fringe story and, I suspect, included to discredit the right for concerns, legitimate concerns, about Obama’s agenda. So far, I have seen no major issue described in the story and there have been plenty.
Pew first identified a slippage in white support immediately after a news conference in July, when Obama surprised many by saying that a white police officer had acted “stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard professor.
Now, we see one of the serious concerns arise. A president on national TV attacks a police officer without knowing any facts except the race of the two parties.
One black congressman, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), was quoted last week alleging that opposition to Obama’s healthcare policies was “a bias, a prejudice, an emotional feeling.”
“Some Americans have not gotten over the fact that Obama is president of the United States. They go to sleep wondering, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Rangel said, according to the New York Post.
Actually, I haven’t gotten over the fact that Rangel, like many senior members of the administration, doesn’t pay his taxes and gets away with it. Now, we get back to the heart of the story:
Democratic pollster David Beattie conducted a survey last month in one competitive congressional district that found that more than a quarter of independents believed Obama had not proven his natural-born status. The same sentiment was expressed by nearly 6 in 10 Republican women — a group that Beattie said would be important for a Democratic victory.
He declined to name the district because the polling was private, but said that such questions about Obama’s background seemed to be a “proxy” for voters’ growing unease with Obama’s ambitious agenda, which has included a potential push to create a government-sponsored health insurance plan.
This is utter BS but evidence of the plan to discredit criticism by linking it to fringe conspiracy theories.
More than half of whites older than 50 approved of Obama’s job performance in April. But now, after weeks of Republican accusations that the Democrats would seek to cut Medicare benefits, that number is 43%. Among white Democrats, Obama’s approval rating dropped to 78%, from 89%.
Some Democrats are hopeful that Republican opposition to Obama may be firing up core conservatives but failing to win over even skeptical centrists and independents to the GOP cause.
I don’t think it took Republicans to make the point that Obama plans Medicare cuts after he has talked about his grandmother’s hip replacement, which he thought a waste, and giving pain pills to an elderly woman instead of a pacemaker. The Democrats in the Senate committee considering the health reform legislation are talking about $500 billion in cuts. It doesn’t take Republicans to say this:
Baucus has declined to release details. But people involved in the talks said the plan would make more than $500 billion worth of changes to Medicare over the next decade, charging wealthy seniors more for prescription drug coverage, cutting $120 billion in payments to private insurance companies that serve some seniors and trimming projected payments to hospitals by $155 billion in an effort to spur efficiencies.
The Times seems to be turning over the race card as a strategy in case Obama doesn’t pull the rabbit out of the hat this week with his speech. I don’t think he will and I think they will turn more and more to these stories to discredit the criticism.
We have another breaking scandal with Governor Sanford of South Carolina, who has been mentioned as a possible presidential prospect. Now, he admits his mystery trip was to visit a woman he is having an affair with in Argentina. What is it with these guys ? At least the Democrats seem to use hookers and interns. That is a short term situation that can usually be covered up unless you are using state funds, or something.
Mr. Spitzer also had prosecuted at least two prostitution rings as head of the state’s organized crime task force.
In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.
“This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. “It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.”
Tell us about it.
Newt Gingrich wrecked his presidential prospects by having affairs and messy divorces. His first wife was ill with cancer when he divorced her. He would be a potential presidential candidate but he is dreaming if he thinks that messy record would not block a nomination. Then we had Ensign’s affair, spiced with some blackmail allegations.
The Democrats are far more tolerant of their politicians. Just contrast the treatment of Mark Foley with that of Barney Frank and Gerry Studds.
Studds continued to be re-elected until his retirement in 1997.
Last week the committee agreed to investigate Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, who has admitted that he had an affair with a male prostitute.
OK, just an affair, but then…
After 18 months, Frank says, he dismissed Gobie upon discovering that he was bringing clients to Frank’s apartment. Two years later, Gobie tried unsuccessfully to sell his story to the Washington Post. He then gave the story to the Washington Times for nothing, in hopes of getting a book contract for the male version of The Mayflower Madam. This week Gobie will appear on Geraldo, discussing his prospects for a television mini-series.
That’s called “a skeleton in Barney’s closet.”
Anyway, Republicans have to know they will be crucified if they have these sex scandals. Any Republican who runs for public office, should have the male version of a chastity belt bolted on. Sanford showed appalling judgement and once again, the Republicans succeed in another self-inflicted wound.