Early Thanksgiving!

Election night was unbelievable. Literally. Down at Democratic Headquarters several dozen folks had gathered to watch the returns, yet the room was strangely quiet over an almost unbearable two hours, as the patient assembly tried to make sense out of the myriad maps and graphs displayed on TV news reports. Then, suddenly, the screen filled with the announcement that Barack Obama would be the 44th President of the United States.

The room erupted into noise and motion as people shouted and danced and hugged and cheered, the emotion of the moment even driving some of us to tears. How to believe that this moment in American history had arrived – and that we had been a part of it?

And yes, everything did change. The rest of the world celebrated right along with us; news flashed from all around the world, like the rolling reports of new years' celebrations, except it was all at once.

It was thrilling, no doubt about it. Especially for those of us who supported Barack Obama for the better part of two years, way too long by some standards, but that’s a problem for another time.

For those who are less than thrilled, but would welcome some good news, let me offer at least one thought.

The election is over.

And another: The winner was Obama, not Clinton.

And this: Rahm Emanuel, known as “Rahmbo,” is to be Chief of Staff at the White House. This appointment likely signals that the Obama administration will be disciplined, and that it will not be pulled to the left by the left-most members of the party. (That could be a whole separate column, so trust me for now.)

There was some collateral damage, too, in that the hapless campaign run by McCain and the Rove acolytes he listened to may have been the death of the Republican Party. And no, I don’t find that cause for celebration, because I believe in the usefulness of a loyal opposition.

But that opposition should be honorable and I think that the Republican Party, after it was hijacked by radicals, lost its moorings. Without those moorings, it will likely be a very, very long time before American politics regains its balance.

How is the Republican Party to become viable again? Certainly not by returning to the slash-and-burn tactics of Rove and Gingrich, now thoroughly discredited as party visionaries. These guys, along with Grover Norquist, are where the blame really should go once the dust settles.

How about revisiting the ideas of William F. Buckley, one of this country’s truly thoughtful intellectuals, about whom George W. Bush said, “Bill Buckley was one of the great founders of the modern conservative movement. He brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America's victory in the Cold War and for the conservative movement that continues to this day.”

Buckley often spoke out strongly against the “neoconservative” approach to government. In a conversation with George Will (no slouch in the matter of conservatism), speaking about the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy abroad as foreign policy, he said:

It's anything but conservative. It's not conservative at all, inasmuch as conservatism doesn't invite unnecessary challenges. It insists on coming to terms with the world as it is, and the notion that merely by affirming these high ideals we can affect highly entrenched systems.

The thoughtful conservatism of Buckley was overrun by radicals like Grover Norquist, head of the euphemistically named Americans for Tax Reform; Norquist once told NPR, “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Starve the government of revenue and you can do away with foolish things like, oh, national defense, public education, Medicare, Social Security, and FEMA.

Norquist was co-author of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America,” and had a long association with Karl Rove. He was instrumental in securing early conservative support for George W. Bush in the lead-up to the 2000 race for the presidency.

In 2003 Paul Krugman, who this year won the Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote:

Here's how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There's a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don't pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these "lucky duckies." (Yes, that's what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as The Journal said, to get their "blood boiling with tax rage."

If I were trying to rebuild the Republican Party I’d get out a new broom and run these guys out of town.

The loveliness of the Obama victory is that it did not involve viciousness (pleas by some worried supporters notwithstanding) and remained calm and thoughtful throughout. And it paid off: Obama won in almost every identifiable constituency, including college graduates making more than $100,000.

Question for Karl Rove: Does this mean that to build a permanent Democratic majority all we have to do is provide college education for everyone that wants it?

The past is prologue?

If some of our more partisan conservative commentators are to be believed, Bill Clinton and his administration are to blame for anything and everything that’s gone wrong in this country since 1992, including bin Laden, Katrina, the subprime mess, and of course the present worldwide economic crisis.

In the latter cases, the line of thought seems to be that the present crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act, originally passed in 1977 and furthered during the Clinton administration. Here’s how it’s described on the Federal Reserve’s own web site:

The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound operations. … The regulation was … most recently amended in August 2005.

The gist always seems to be that lending to minorities is what got us here, and that it is all the fault of the Clinton administration.

Just a couple of observations: First, you’ll note that the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to operate in a way “consistent with safe and sound operations.” And, second (and perhaps most significant), the Act was “most recently amended in August 2005.”

Daniel Gross, writing in the October 7, 2008 issue of Newsweek, summed it up best:

The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glove with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, entities to which the CRA likewise didn't apply. … Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on subprime debt.

Though I believed from experience that there have been many, many foreclosures that weren’t necessarily related to subprime lending, the Gross article offered some detail, pointing out that, for example, a builder of high-end condominiums in Florida filed for bankruptcy just a couple of months ago:

Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities.

And it’s a myth that lending to poor folks or minorities is in itself risky. Gross cites a recent New York Times report that

... a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.

The villains in the subprime lending debacle were in it for the money. The loan fees for such loans are higher than those for conventional loans, and I’ve seen for myself cases where the buyer who would have qualified for a conventional or FHA loan was pushed into a subprime loan because the loan officer was greedy. And, of course, there were loans made that should never have passed underwriting because the loan officer was simply dishonest.

Even so, if you want to blame it all on Clinton, what do you do about the fact that, when the Act was amended in 2005, the Presidency and both houses of Congress were under the complete control of Mr. Bush and the Republicans?

Hm.

I leave the reader to think about it while I point the finger in another, more sinister, direction.

Back in 1996, in what may have been a prescient letter to the New York Times, I wrote:

I believe now that Newt Gingrich, with the perhaps unwitting support of the famous “freshmen” he so carefully recruited, programmed and brought to Washington, does have it in his mind to dismantle if not destroy our federal government. I think it’s time for someone to openly question whether his intentions are honorable.

His unrelenting “Newtspeak” attacks on existing government programs, his vilification of anyone opposing him, his brazen moves to destabilize Wall Street, his cultivation of discord and fostering of anarchy, and finally his dismissal of public disagreement with comments that amount to ‘progress is painful, but I know what’s good for America,’ suggest that Americans had better pay attention when he calls it ‘revolution.’ Those who call him brilliant would do well to recall Hitler, for one, among those revolutionaries of history who used similar tactics to take control of the existing government. It is increasingly apparent that Gingrich’s agenda includes a revised constitution that he intends to write and a ‘revolutionary’ government that he intends to control.

Judging by the ineffectiveness of our scattered protests, he seems to have convinced the American people that we cannot stop the inevitable.

Every politician in Washington claims to care most about “middle class Americans.” Well, the working people of America — the true middle class — had better stand up for themselves, or suffer the consequences.

During the recent turmoil in Washington while Congress tried to decide what to do, it was reported on good authority (Andrea Mitchell) that ol’ Newt had been working furiously behind the scenes in opposition to the “bailout” legislation – before he came out in support of it. There was also mention of the possibility that he is preparing a run for President in 2012.

Another something to think about.