The Limbaugh Narrative

Ross Douthat quotes liberally from Rush Limbaugh's pre-emptive explanation of the Republicans' Waterloo: the moderates dunnit. And by "moderates", Rush means everybody from Colin Powell to . . . Ross Douthat!

Ross only engages this argument, if you can call it that, at a very meta level, at least in this particular post. At the risk of merely repeating Ross's own work, I would like to address it in more detail.

While I have to confess to my own bafflement at how John McCain won the nomination (more on this in a moment), I'm not persuaded by Limbaugh's argument that the conservative intelligentsia put one over on Republican primary voters by selling them on the idea that only a "moderate" could win. That is not my recollection. On the contrary, I recall McCain running as a true conservative, plus a compelling biography, plus steadfastness on the war. To the extent anyone thought him a moderate, like NR, they were NOT supporting him.

Now, neither I nor anyone I know bought into the "McCain is a true conservative" line. While many of them appreciated his support for "the Surge" (I did not), this was not enough to outweigh his earlier support for amnesty.

My best explanation for his win was that those opposed to McCain divided their votes between Romney (the men) and Huckabee (the women). But the weakness of this theory is that the "moderate" faction, to the extent we can call it that, also divided its votes between McCain and Guiliani. In the final analysis, it is not clear to me that the conservatives outvoted the moderates at all, which says something about Republican primary voters today.

Neither Romney nor Huckabee were without weaknesses, of course. Romney's conservatism was, politically speaking, only a few hours old, and in any case was not the theme of his campaign. Meanwhile, Huckabee's persona was off-putting to anyone not a conservative southern Evangelical, plus he showed a limited ability to engage arguments about his own policies.

But . . . why McCain? Seriously, since I don't know any McCain voters from the primary, can anyone sketch me a profile of what one looks like?

I now come to my point: McCain's coming defeat in the general election is not because he's not conservative enough. On the contrary, watching McCain is like watching a weird parody of Republican Greatest Hits, 1980 - 1988. It's that his talking points are detached from the reality around us. Promises of tax cuts don't mean anything if you're loosing money. Support for the surge doesn't mean anything if you think the Iraq war has outlived its usefulness to American security. Attacks on Obama's association with William Ayers doesn't mean anything if he can't tie it to some issue that voters actually care about.

As Steve points out today, McCain's campaign isn't about anything. Contra Half Sigma, the only time McCain pulled ahead of Obama this cycle was after his nomination of Sarah Palin, a lead he lost as it became clear that Palin brought no substance of her own to the campaign, and could only repeat McCain's substance-free talking points . . . very, very badly.

UPDATE: We've got a live one!

The CRA and the Mortgage Meltdown

Via Steve Sailer, I've been reading "Anatomy of a Train Wreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown", by Stan J. Liebowitz under the auspices of the Independent Institute. Unlike a lot of commentary, Liebowitz gets into the specifics of how government agencies and pressure groups were able to leverage to Community Reinvestment Act to force lenders to discard their standards and make loans to poor minorities.

In addition to thoroughly discrediting that infamous study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston that alleged discriminatory lending practices, Liebowitz quotes extensively from the Boston Fed's follow-up publication, "{Closing The Gap:} A Guide To Equal Opportunity Lending" (braces in the original). Some choice tidbits:

Did You Know? Failure to comply with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act or Regulation B can subject a financial institution to civil liability for actual and punitive damages in individual or class actions. Liability for punitive damages can be as much as $10,000 in individual actions and the lesser of $500,000 or 1 percent of the creditor’s net worth in class actions.

...

Even the most determined lending institution will have difficulty cultivating business from minority customers if its underwriting standards contain arbitrary or unreasonable measures of creditworthiness.

...

In reviewing past credit problems, lenders should be willing to consider extenuating circumstances.

...

Successful participation in credit counseling or buyer education programs is another way that applicants can demonstrate an ability to manage their debts responsibly.

...

Read the whole thing.

Despair

Rod Dreher, for once, nails it:

I cannot believe that this country is in the critical condition that it's in, and these are the politicians we're asked to choose from as our next leader. Neither McCain nor Obama spoke with any credibility or seriousness about our situation. When asked what sacrifices they would ask the American people to make in light of the crisis and its likely fallout, they punted. It made me so angry! I have no use for either of those pandering mannequins.

McCain is the conservative in the race, though, and he gave no reason at all to give conservative ideas a hearing . . . . Obama won this dull, worthless "debate," for what that's worth, and he's going to win the election. Nothing McCain did tonight changed a thing. He's done. This race is now the 2008 version of Clinton vs. Dole. And you know how well that turned out for the Republicans.

The silver lining: Obama and the Democrats are going to own this godawful mess. And the conservative movement can clear the deadwood out of the way, and start to rebuild itself into a credible force.

I would add that my prediction about Sarah Palin turned out to be correct: her nomination ultimately meant nothing of substance. She is a compelling biography and a competent governor; she is not, however, in possession of a single worthwhile thought on any national issue outside of energy.

But the coming electoral calamity is properly owned by McCain, and that segment of the Republican party that attempted to foist him upon the electorate. It was his responsibility to be about something; instead, he offered us everything we didn't like about the Bush administration, and nothing we did. He will lose; he will have deserved to lose; and the fact that the Democrats also deserve to lose is at this point essentially irrelevant.

Democracy lets people choose their government, and we deserve to get it good and hard.

On Small Town America

In a previous post, I allowed that, after spending my toddlerhood in an inner suburb of a large metropolis, the vicissitudes of life carried me to the small southern town where I would spend five years of my pre-teen life.

There were a lot of changes wrapped up in this move. Our standard of living went from being "upper middle class" to "lower middle class" or worse, although culturally we remained what we were. I had never given any notice to things like heat in the winter, or clothes; now I dressed in the kitchen by the gas heater because in my own room I could see my breath in the winter time. While the clothes were adequate, the best I could hope for was whatever my classmates had worn last year.

The environment changed as well. My suburban school had been pretty uniform SES-wise. Our school out in the country, especially after it was consolidated at a new location, was very diverse. We had a noticeable percentage of blacks; we also had students who appeared to come from relatively wealthy families; we had the poor whites from farming families hit hard by the recession.

Our family was culturally aloof from our surroundings. I grew up, not with country music or some proto version of talk radio, but with NPR. Indeed, to this day, the theme music and soothing voices of "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" evoke memories of hearth and home (although the actual content seems from another planet). While I no doubt agree with Rush Limbaugh more often than not, I yet find his aesthetic distasteful.

I had few friends there. In contrast to the suburbs, interpersonal conflicts stood a large chance of turning physical, and being a skinny weakling, I avoided conflict by avoiding people.

I never played football or attended any games; instead, I took piano lessons. I have no idea what my "peers" did on Saturday; I was manning the community library. I guess the other children attended church, but they were different churches; my brother and I were, with sporadic exceptions, the only ones younger than our own parents. In sixth grade, when we got to take electives, my male peers lined up to take skeet shooting. I took drama. Their runaway favorite television show was "The Dukes of Hazzard", a show I was forbidden to watch.

But was this any different from suburbia? I didn't have any friends there, either. As a child, I wasn't interested in "cultural broadening". Museums bored me. Classical music concerts were a drag after the first 10 minutes. These limitations were hardly the fault of the community; they were borne differently in a small town vs. a major city, but they weren't going away.

The late seventies / early eighties were a great time to be a kid in a small town. I biked everywhere. I explored the woods. I played by the creek. If I was lucky, I got to see what 12-ga. birdshot could do to a road sign, this being the preferred passtime of high school students.

And now?

My job has always required me to live in or near moderate to large cities. In the space / time tradeoff, I always chose the short commute time over the wide open spaces. And my wife, who lived for a time in New York City, prefers the urban landscape to the countryside. Further, my particular engineering discipline cannot very well be practiced outside of major metropolitan areas. So here I am. I don't object to living in a small town, but it is unlikely that I ever will. Addendum: while writing this post, I discovered that my school had a shooting back in '95 in which a student killed a teacher and a 16 year-old classmate.

On the Virtues and Vices of Rural America

Via Rod Dreher, an article in Reason entitled, "Palin's Small-Town Snobbery," which turns out is not limited to Palin, but is fairly widespread among the 20% of the country that does NOT live in cities and suburbs, and treated indulgently by the other 80%.

I spent five years of my childhood in a town with a population of 300. The county seat was about half an hour away, which seemed like a long way as a child since we didn't go there but once every few weeks, although I realize that today it isn't even that much of a commute. My feelings about living there are decidedly mixed; more on this later. But first, the Reason article:

Nor is the countryside exempt from social problems often associated with the inner city—such as, if you'll forgive me, out-of-wedlock births. The federal government apparently doesn't tabulate these births according to whether they occur in urban or rural areas. But it does break them down by state, and wide-open spaces are no guarantee of responsible sexual behavior.

The highest rates of births to unwed mothers are in Mississippi and New Mexico, both of which have high rural populations. The most urban states, New Jersey and California, do better than the average in out-of-wedlock births.

Let's check the demographics of Mississippi and New Mexico. Yup, just as expected. What I did not expect was that Reason's editors would be so far off their game as to allow this kind of cherry picking. Did no one think that the fact that Mississippi is 30% black, or that New Mexico is 40% Latino and 10% American Indian, might be driving those kind of statistics?

Other features of small town life, such as higher rates of drug and alcohol use among teens, are more complex, as the author is happy to concede in the case of it's lower crime rate. Still, though, Palin's reverse snobbery did not occur in a vacuum. Her paeon to small town life was her response to being endlessly dismissed as "the mayor of a town of 9000." Here again, Reason seems to have forgotten who picked that particular fight.

I'll write a separate post on my experience of small town life.

Housing Crisis: Making It Personal

Steve Sailer caps a series of posts on the housing crisis with some statistics from the California housing market.

Steve had written previously that an appropriate median home price / median AGI ratio is about 2.5. Oddly, this has been about the ratio I've targeted in my own home purchases, but I had never really considered looking at the community ratio to guage whether home prices were out of whack.

Along comes City Data, a website readers can look up the stats for their area by city or zip code, whichever is more meaningful. So I used the zip codes to compare the median house value of 2005 with the median AGI of 2004 (the most recent data, but fairly representative of the boom years) for my three real-estate holdings.

Gulf Coast: 4.1. Ouch! This is consistent with the $20K drop in the assessed value (courtesy of the tax assessor) from last year to this. The good news is that I bought it pre-boom, so the house is still almost twice as valuable now as it was when I purchased it (if the tax assessor is correct), and still rented out profitably.

Rocky Mountains: 3.9. The assessed value actually increased by $30K between last year and this, but I'm pretty sure the values were calculated a year in advance, so they probably reflect the 2007 value over the 2006 value. It also may reflect the $20K or so in improvements (added A/C, massive landscaping) I made during the three years I lived in it. I'll have a better idea come next year. I purchased this house in the middle of the boom, and the rental income only covers the payment when there is no maintenance. But . . . enter the magic of rental property depreciation, which saves me $1200 in taxes every year from this property alone.

Upper Midwest: 2.1. The housing boom never happened where I presently live, so the bust has largely skipped us as well. But here's the thing: in all three communities, while the median sale price has only slumped rather than crashed, the number of home sales has crashed, often dramatically. For instance, in my Gulf Coast zip code, the number of home sales fell from 350 during the second quarter of 2005 to only 75 for the second quarter of 2008. Ditto for the Rockies: 470 to 140. Ditto for the Midwest: 170 to 70. This could mean that the wave of speculative sales has ended; it could also mean that unsold inventories are accumulating until the prices adjust to reflect the new market realities.

The stock market, however, depresses the shit out of me. My portfolio is approximately (the exact number is too depressing to contemplate) $20K poorer than it was in January. I also looked at the average total returns of my 14 year investing life: two percent, as of the end of September. Two percent! Measily bank interest. So much for being a "long run" investor. I can take small satisfaction in watching the further decline of the stuff I dumped at the early stages.

On Counter-Apologetics

Derbyshire, in his September Diary, fulminates against Christianity (again):

I am tempted to say that any believers out there who feel like writing a book of apologetics should imitate [Paul Johnson's] approach, if they want to make any impression on the unbelieving reader (which I suspect very few of them actually do want to do) . . . . For an unbeliever, though, most apologetics is thin and dreary stuff. Thinnest and dreariest of all so far was the book all my Christian friends told me I must read, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

I believe Derbyshire when he says he finds Mere Christianity unpersuasive. Back when I read it (college) I found Lewis' reasoning airtight, yet I was disappointed to discover that his arguments made little impact on those with whom I shared them.

This experience made Calvin's doctrine of God's sovereignty all the more salient. We are not, by nature, basically good, basically rational creatures just waiting for the gospel to be properly explained to us by C.S. Lewis. On the contrary, rebellion against God is mankind's default state. It is only by God's prior regeneration that we can even understand it, let alone respond to it. As the Shorter Catechism says,

Effectual calling is an act of God's free grace, whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, He doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel.

I've written this often enough that I should put it in a macro. But let's accept, arguendo, that the Derb's standard of persuasiveness is appropriate, and hold atheism to that standard: how many believers have been persuaded by the writings of, say, Sam Harris, to renounce their faith? Can Derbyshire name one person? Let's compare that number to the number for whom Mere Christianity answered their lingering objections. Does anyone doubt which number is greater?

Elsewhere in his post:

American liberalism and American conservatism have both in turn been debauched by presidents filled with religious zeal (J. Carter and G. W. Bush respectively). Perhaps atheism may yet be the salvation of the Republic.

Without defending George Bush, the assesment of whom I basically agree with Derbyshire, I would point out that atheism is functionally religious in the minds of most of its adherents, and the magical thinking Derbyshire loathes so much makes its political home in the party of unbelief. Derbyshire may have forgotten this, but cold-blooded rationalism on the level of GNXP is a trait shared by only a tiny, tiny minority of political actors. Yes, Bush, by virtue of his party affiliation convinced far too many people that the purity of our intentions could overcome any obstacle, but if Derbyshire believes that atheists are riding to extricate us from this disaster, then Derbyshire is guilty of the same magical thinking.