Showing posts with label 2008 election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2008 election. Show all posts

October 27, 2008

Defaulting Latinos are voting for Obama

The LA Times walks around a Latino neighborhood in Las Vegas and finds growing support for Obama among the multitudinous "homeowners" who have defaulted on their mortgages and are awaiting foreclosure.

This helps explain a minor puzzle of recent history. As you'll recall, the 2004 exit poll initially reported that Bush had won 44% of the Hispanic vote. I pointed out how implausible this was from real world voting totals, and the exit poll people eventually admitted they'd messed up their methodology and the real number was around 40%.

But even 40% is pretty high for a Republican Presidential candidates. So, how did Bush and Rove get up around 40%?

Bush and Rove bought Latino votes in 2004 with Other People's Money. Bush's Housing Bubble was, more than anything else, a Hispanic Housing Bubble, with total mortgage dollars for Hispanic homebuyers going up an incredible 691% from 1999 to 2006. And all that cash flowing for home loans and home equity loans, whether to Hispanics or others, paid for a lot of Hispanic construction and home improvement workers.

Now, the firehose of money has been turned off because the reserves have been pumped dry, and Hispanics are flooding back to their natural home in the Democratic Party.

2008

I don't endorse political candidates, but The American Conservative asked me and 20 others what we thought of the election. I replied:

Both major party candidates have campaigned against partisan bickering. And yet we are paying a high price for Washington’s bipartisan consensus. Perhaps the least controversial set of programs in all of Washington—the manifold government efforts under both the Clinton and Bush administrations to relax mortgage credit standards to increase minority and low-income home ownership—has turned out among the most disastrous.

America has been driven into the ditch by Washington’s grand strategy—Invade the World, Invite the World, and In Hock to the World or, as Daniel Larison put it, “Imperialism, Immigration, and Insolvency”.

Obama is probably somewhat better than McCain on imperialism. It would be hard to be worse. They’re comparably terrible on immigration. And Obama is likely worse on insolvency. He wrote in his 460-page autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, about his lifelong efforts to become a leader in his “people’s struggle,” which he assumes, to put it crassly but clearly, is to extract money for his race. Thus, Obama has been in bed for decades with ACORN, the radical Left outfit that makes its living shaking down the mortgage industry. Obama sued Citibank during his antidiscrimination lawyer career to get them to lower their standards for handing out mortgages to blacks.

Therefore, I intend to do in 2008 what I did during the Bush-Kerry whoop-tee-doo: write in the name of a public figure who is actually trying to solve a major, long-term problem, my friend Ward Connerly. Just as Social Security can’t afford too many retirees per worker, America won’t be able to afford its affirmative-action system when the racial ratio of minority beneficiaries per white benefactor reaches excessive levels. As America becomes majority minority (by 2042, by latest Census projection), the cost of affirmative action will become crippling. By helping get government racial preferences banned by voter initiative in California, Washington, and Michigan, Ward has made the future a little less grim.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 26, 2008

What McCain Should Have Done

As you may have noticed, John McCain hasn't had any kind of theme to his campaign. He can't go after Obama on what Obama is vulnerable on because that's all tied into race, so Obama gets a free pass on that.

What John McCain should have done in this race is embrace his Grumpy Old Manness and run as the we've-got-to-live-within-our-means candidate. Run against the whole Debt Debauch, the no-money-down culture, the get rich quick attitude. Run against Bush's campaign against down payments.

Don't run in favor of "regulation," run in favor of "thrift" and "prudence," on old fashioned non-ideologue conservatism.

Embrace his old scandal. Talk about how you let a donor get you involved in the S&L bad loan scandal in the 1980s, and that was shameful and humiliating and you learned a big lesson from that.

Talk about how your opponent just wants to take your money and use it to expand the number of government employees in his political base, social workers. And we can't afford that.

Of course, there would have been a big walk the walk problem with McCain, since he doesn't seem very thrifty himself. For example, he'd probably have what you'd call a gambling problem if he didn't have a rich wife. Like John Kerry, he's a good catch who used his attractiveness to women to land a rich wife. (Not a bad strategy, by the way.)

And I imagine McCain wasn't actually against all this stuff back when it was going on. Nobody who was anybody was.

But at least this would have given him a theme.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 23, 2008

Bill Ayers and his lovely fork-appreciating wife have new book coming out

Mr. and Mrs. Ayers have a new book listed on Amazon.com.
Product Description
White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.


About the Author
William C. Ayers is a distinguished professor of education and a senior university scholar at the University of Illinois–Chicago. He is the author of To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and Fugitive Days, a memoir about his life with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bernardine Dohrn is the director of the Children and Family Law Justice Center and a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University. She is the coauthor of A Century of Juvenile Justice and Justice in the Making. They live in Chicago.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Third World Press (June 1, 2009)

Where's Rev. Wright's book?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Biden's loin-girding: I told you so

Way back in August, I described Joe Biden as "kind of a bozo." But then the whole world decided that they either hated or loved Sarah Palin, and everybody decided that therefore, through some sort of reverse osmosis process, Biden must be a Steady Hand on the Tiller etc etc.

Nah, he's a garrulous old hack, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's the wrong thing in a Vice President. The VP is supposed to be the next best thing to the President, which means people (especially foreigners, who don't know any better) listen to him, which means he isn't supposed to talk too much. He's supposed to just stand there looking sad while they lower the dictator of Bebukustan into the ground. Al Gore was good at that.

Biden's not. Every so often, he just can't control himself, and then you get incidents like "I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.''

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 22, 2008

Best. Election. Ever. Colin Powell sings, dances in celebration of Nigerian email fraud

Via Craptocracy, we learn that three days before endorsing Barack Obama, Colin Powell warmed up by, well ....

From the Guardian:

Colin Powell celebrated his 71st birthday this year but he's clearly not too old to pull some cheeky Afro-hip-hop moves. His take on Olu Maintain's song Yahooze at the Africa Rising event at the Royal Albert Hall worked a lot better than his former boss George Bush's embarrassing inaugural shape-throwing alongside Ricky Martin. Although he kept his jacket buttoned, almost everyone deemed his dancing spot-on.

But it doesn't look as if the former US secretary of state paid too much attention to the lyrics, or he might have discovered that the Nigerian hit is a celebration of that country's most infamous export, advance-fee email fraud (sometimes called 419 fraud, after the relevant section of the Nigerian penal code). The perpetrators are known as "Yahoo boys" after their email service-provider of choice.

He told the crowd:

"I stand before you tonight as an African-American," The Times quoted Powell as telling the audience. "Many people say to me, 'You became secretary of state of the USA., is it really necessary to say you are an African-American, or that you are black?' And I say, 'Yes,' so that we can remind our children. It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history. I didn't just drop out of the sky. People came from my continent in chains. There's no reason a new Africa can't be created right here and now."

Of course, it's purely racist for anybody to suggest that race had any influence on Powell's endorsement of Obama, even when Powell admits it was a factor.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 4, 2008

Has McCain Thrown in the Towel?

From "McCain Plans Fiercer Strategy Against Obama" in the Washington Post:

Two other top Republicans said the new ads are likely to hammer the senator from Illinois on his connections to convicted Chicago developer Antoin "Tony" Rezko and former radical William Ayres, whom the McCain campaign regularly calls a domestic terrorist because of his acts of violence against the U.S. government in the 1960s.

But not all that fierce:

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. appears to be off limits after McCain condemned the North Carolina Republican Party in April for an ad that linked Obama to his former pastor, saying, "Unfortunately, all I can do is, in as visible a way as possible, disassociate myself from that kind of campaigning."

Wright is ten times as important a figure in Obama's life as Rezko, and 100 times as important as Ayers. But Wright is off limits because he's black. I figured that's what would happen back in February.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 1, 2008

The French see Palin as Annie Oakley

Steven Erlanger writes in the NYT:

They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as “Sarko the American.”

But this year has been difficult for the French. Mr. Sarkozy has generally supported American foreign policy and has praised the United States’ openness and entrepreneurial verve. And the sudden emergence of Senator Barack Obama — black, and seen as elegant and engaged with the larger world — has sent many French into a swoon.

But the combination of two recent surprises — Gov. Sarah Palin and America’s terrifying financial meltdown — has brought older, nearly instinctual anti-American responses back to the surface.

These two surprises, one after the other, have refreshed clichés retailed under President Bush, confirming the deeply held belief of the French that the United States remains the frontier, led by impenetrably smug and incurious upstarts who have little history, experience or wisdom.

Even worse, from the French perspective, Americans are reckless optimists, incurably blind to the tragedy of life, to the weary convolutions of history and thus to the need for lengthy August vacations and financial regulations.

While the French see themselves as the heirs of urban revolutionaries, with a strong distaste for politicized religion, the American revolutionary spirit seems to them these days to come like a hurricane from the uncosmopolitan right — from the dry, dull flatlands of Texas ranch country or the emptiness of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Wyoming, and now from the odd sunset communities of Arizona and the bizarre bars, churches and hockey rinks of Alaska.

The financial meltdown also seems inevitably American, a product of the reckless audacity that the French pretend to abhor, but often secretly admire. But however careful France’s own banks may have been, the United States is so large and so dominant that the French are afraid of being hit with what one economist, Daniel Cohen, called the “toxic waste” of the scandal.

This year, mocking the candidates has become an industry, with the satirical puppet show “Les Guignols de l’Info” recently adding a squeaky-voiced Senator John McCain puppet to the jug-eared Obama model. In general, though, Americans are portrayed as Sylvester Stallone, lunky and thick-headed. Ms. Palin has been a kind of godsend.

The French know exactly what to make of her, said Frédéric Rouvillois, and that is the problem. Ms. Palin may be an American dream but she is a French nightmare, said Mr. Rouvillois, a lawyer and social historian who has just written a book titled “The History of Snobbery.”

“She’s a caricature of a certain America that hasn’t parted with its boorish ‘Wild West’ side,” said the impish Mr. Rouvillois, who has also written a history of good manners. “For the French snob, the only admissible American is from the East Coast, knows Henry James, is comfortable in French, a sort of European on the other side of the Atlantic.”

A little, yes, like Senator John Kerry. ...

France, like most of Europe, is quite taken with the Democratic candidate, whom the French regard as a “métis,” politely translated as someone of mixed race, usually used for those of African colonial ancestry. Mr. Obama is seen uniquely as an American métis with global experience and antecedents in Africa, through his Kenyan father, not in slavery.

Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote in the magazine Le Point of Mr. Obama as a new type of American black politician.

“Obama is, certainly, black,” Mr. Lévy wrote. “But not black like Jesse Jackson; not black like Al Sharpton; not black like the blacks born in Alabama or in Tennessee and who, when they appear, bring out in Americans the memories of slavery, lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan — no; a black from Africa; a black descending not from a slave but from a Kenyan; a black who, consequently, has the incomparable merit of not reminding middle America of the shameful pages of its history.”

He goes on for a while, but you get the idea.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Another secret reader

A couple of weeks back, I suggested that Obama mention that he plays poker while McCain likes to roll the dice, poker being a game of skill while craps is, well, a crapshoot. Earlier this week,

I read the other day that Senator McCain likes to gamble. He likes to roll those dice. And that's okay. I enjoy a little friendly game of poker myself every now and then.

But one thing I know is this -- we can't afford to gamble on four more years of the same disastrous economic policies we've had for the last eight.

I know that when Senator McCain says he wants to bring the same kind of deregulation to our health care system that he helped bring to our banking system -- his words -- well, that's a bet we can't afford. We can't afford to roll the dice by privatizing Social Security, and wagering the nest egg of millions of Americans on Wall Street. We can't afford to gamble on more of the same trickle down philosophy that showers tax breaks on big corporations and the wealthiest few. We've tried that. It doesn't work.

Sen. Barack Obama

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 25, 2008

McCain's newest campaign managers announced

John McCain, who either will or won't debate Barack Obama on Friday night, announced Thursday evening that he has accepted the resignation of campaign manager Rick Davis, after revelations that Davis was accepting payola from Freddie Mac, and that his campaign tactics this week have been masterminded by Don King and the ghost of Bobby Fischer.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Real McCain?

What's the deal with McCain suspending his campaign?

Greg Cochran suggests, in the mode of Robert Heinlein's Double Star, it's because the actor who will serve as his double on the campaign trail until McCain gets over some undisclosed medical problem hasn't quite recovered from his appearance-altering plastic surgery yet. Of course, in Double Star the elderly politician never recovers, so the 40-something ham actor winds up living an extra 30 years of the statesman's life for him as Prime Minister of the Solar System.

Perhaps when the surprisingly spry UN General Secretary John McCain celebrates his 100th birthday in office, historians will begin to wonder why Kevin Spacey's film career ended so abruptly in the fall of 2008.

But here's my favorite, from david in the comments section:

"Or he's having second thoughts: who wants to be president of a bankrupt country that's soon to disintegrate?

"'I have seen the future, and I quit.'"

To be serious, though, I could imagine that McCain might have had some medical bad news and might want a few days to get second opinions and consider his options. That happened to me a dozen years ago and it doesn't leave you in the mood for public dispay. If so, I wish him all the luck in the world.

Does anybody know what the Republican Party's contingency plan is if a nominee has to drop out late in the race?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 24, 2008

McCain suspends campaign?!?

Huh?

My guess is that he's got the cold/flu thingie that's going around and doesn't want to admit it, so he's blaming the fiscal crisis rather than his physical problems. But who knows...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 23, 2008

My advice on livening up the Obama-McCain debate

John McCain hasn't mentioned Rev. Jeremiah Wright in months, so I imagine he won't start in Friday's debate ...

But here's something I posted last March on the eve of Obama's 5,000 word oration on the edifying ineffability of his nuanced thoughtfulness about race (which, by the way, happened right after the Bear Stearns collapse):

Keep in mind that the Wright-Obama connection has two interrelated but distinguishable aspects: the black racial angle and leftist ideological angle. My guess is that Obama will play up the black angle of his past (as being both more understandable -- seeing as how Obama, kind of like Jesus, was a poor black child raised by a single mother in the ghetto of Honolulu -- and more untouchable by the press) and totally ignore the leftist angle.

It would be more fun if Obama reversed the polarity and snarled, "Yeah, yeah, for the last 12 years, I forced myself to nod in seeming agreement when all those smug Friedmanite economists at my University of Chicago would ramble on about the magic of the market. But, in my heart, I knew this glorious day would someday come when the capitalist system crumbles in ruins! Nyah-hah-hah-hah!"

That would be cool.

September 13, 2008

Obama ad idea: poker v. craps

A factoid/metaphor that Obama should try to get to the public's attention is that he plays poker while McCain loves to roll the dice. Which kind of man do you want to see conducting America's foreign policy?

September 10, 2008

"Just How Stupid Are We?"

Senator Obama said:

“[Palin] was for [the Bridge to Nowhere] until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it,” Mr. Obama said, speaking over an applauding crowd in Michigan. “I mean, you can’t just make stuff up. (Maybe, maybe not.] You can’t just recreate yourself [Yes, you can -- See Obama 2000 vs. Obama 2001]. You can’t just reinvent yourself [The gentleman doth protest too much]. The American people aren’t stupid. [Yes, we are.]

Speaking of how stupid we are, here's a summary of historian Rick Shenkman's book, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 9, 2008

The politics of personal destruction

Personally, I'm all for them, at least when it comes to anybody who wants to be our President or Vice President.

Obama has been all high-minded about the evils of negative campaigning for the last 18 months (out of the purity of the Chicago politician's heart, no doubt, rather than out of any instinct for self-preservation). But as soon as the GOP finally comes up with somebody with comparable charisma, Democrats went into a feeding frenzy of scandal-mongering.

As well they should. A vice president could become president.

Of course, the president is president, so one might think that presidential candidates would be exposed to similar scrutiny, but it doesn't seem to work that way.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 8, 2008

Was Rev. Wright mentioned during Republican convention?

Question: How many speakers at the Republican convention last week mentioned Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.?

I did text searches on the speeches by McCain, Palin, Giuliani, Lieberman, Romney, and Steele (the main black speaker) and didn't find any mentions of "Wright," "pastor," "minister," "church," or "Trinity."

As a commenter suggested, you might think that keynote speaker Rudy Giuliani could have had some fun with Wright's comment, as reported by Newsday last March:

From the Wright-written eulogy for scholar Asa Hilliard in the Dec. 2007 edition of the Trumpet magazine [published by Wright's daughter]: "(Jesus') enemies had their opinion about Him... The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans."

After calling Jesus's crucifixion "a public lynching Italian style" executed in "Apartheid Rome," he goes on to claim that white supremacists run the U.S. government:

"The government runs everything from the White House to the schoolhouse, from the Capitol to the Klan, white supremacy is clearly in charge ..."

Senator Obama gave $53,000 to Rev. Wright's church in 2005-2007.

But, no, all is forgiven and forgotten, apparently ...

The only mention in the press of this curious absence of Rev. Wright's name from the GOP convention I could find was a Madison, WI religion columnist who noted:

"I was fascinated during the Republican convention this past week that for all the attacks on Obama, the furor from last spring over Jeremiah Wright seemed to have been taken off the table. I imagine that was done in part because of the racial subtext of that furor ..."

And exactly how much credit are the Republicans getting for their forebearance in not going after the juiciest target? Zero. They are being denounced for making a joke about community organizers!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 6, 2008

Brimelow offers Obama some unsolicited advice

On the VDARE.com blog, Peter Brimelow suggests:

Obama and the Democrats can easily break this [Palin] momentum. All Obama has to do is ask John McCain (who, despite appearances, is still the GOP presidential nominee) to pledge, in the spirit of the bipartisanshipthat McCain was going on about Thursday night, that they will both work together for amnesty in the next Congress, regardless of which of them goes to the White House and which of them remains in the U.S. Senate.

McCain would be really stuck. He can’t refuse because (a) he really wants an amnesty and was fanatically committed to the Kennedy-Bush version; (b) he actually believes all this innumerate nonsense about the Hispanic vote.

But he can’t agree because that will utterly dispel the delusions of his desperate base.

Checkmate!

Obama could specifically offer McCain an agreement in which they both pledge to work together to pass in 2009 the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (S. 1033), which was proposed by John McCain.

Obama could say something like,
"The comprehensive immigration reform bill that Senator McCain wrote with Senator Kennedy is not entirely to my taste, but I'm willing to put up with the parts of Senator McCain's amnesty plan that I don't like so that we can be sure something finally gets done. After all, I have to admit that Senator McCain has worked far harder over the last four years to provide amnesty to illegal aliens than I have. Therefore, to break the logjam in Washington, I'll offer to take his word for it that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill is the right approach to amnesty. Clearly, Senator McCain is the expert on amnesty, not me. Giving amnesty to illegal aliens undoubtedly means more to him than, to be frank, amnesty means to me, so I'm willing, if he's willing, to pledge to pass his illegal immigrant legalization bill, which -- did I mention? -- he wrote."

If McCain replies that he's no longer for his bill, Obama could say with a puzzled look on his face, "Oh, so you were for it before you were against it? I see ..." and nod his head slowly, while scratching his chin, furrowing his brow and biting his lip in a thoughtful manner. Then, suddenly (and, preferably, with Franklin Roosevelt's Mid-Atlantic accent), "But, aren't we talking about your own bill? If it is a bad bill, why did you propose it? If it is a good bill, why are you against it?"

FDR could have gone on in this disingenuously ingenuous vein for weeks, having a grand old time at his rival's expense while the Republican base's enthusiasm for its nominee collapses, but, somehow, I don't think Obama can bring himself to play dumb, even to get elected President.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 3, 2008

Open comment thread on Palin's speech

I don't have anything to say because I didn't see the speech. I was too preoccupied with studying the psychodemographics of frolf (see below). (I can always catch up with it on Youtube, right?) So, have your say in the Comments.

By the way, the original speechwriter was apparently American Conservative contributor Matthew Scully, so if a few of the lines about Obama sound like they came from somebody familiar with my articles, perhaps they did.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Speaking of vetting ...

How about we all pat ourselves on the back for the great job this country did in vetting the Democratic nominee for President? After all, by the middle of March 2008, when the vast majority of Americans first heard about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., there were still eight (count 'em, eight!) states that hadn't yet held primaries or caucuses. Sure, 42 primaries / caucuses had been held in ignorance of Barack Obama's actual background, but, hey, 8 out of 50 ain't bad!

By the time the Rev. came back from his cruise and proved six weeks later that in Obama's celebrated "More Perfect Union" oration, Obama had merely been "saying what a politician has to say," thus making Obama so mad he finally did disown Wright, there were still seven states left. And by the time Rev. Wright's much ballyhooed successor, Otis Moss, had proven how leftist he was, causing Obama to disown his church at the very end of May, there were two entire primaries left.

America, you're doing a heck of a job!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer