By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I can’t think of anything in Church doctrine that prohibits Catholics from participating in partisan political spin. We have a right to put the best face possible on the agenda of the political party we favor.
Outright lying is a different matter. As are slander and defamation of character. We have an obligation to draw the necessary lines in this matter, a duty to seek and defend the truth in pursuit of the common good in debates over public policy.
Where is this heading? Don’t you feel at times that the adversaries in some of the major political debates of our time talk past each other; that if someone could get them to sit down and discuss the issue rationally they might reach a common ground? That, for example, those who scream at each other over the slogan “Black Lives Matter” should be able to agree that all life is sacred — but also that African-Americans have a right to protest individual acts of police brutality in their community.
Similarly, shouldn’t the people who are at odds over the Obama administration’s reluctance to use the term “radical Islam” be able to agree that it is wise not to unnecessarily insult moderate Muslims, but also important to accurately identify the elements in the Muslim world who are hell-bent on killing us? You get the impression that the talking points are more important to the disputants in this matter than the truth.
The angry exchanges between the left and the right about who was responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis, and its role in causing the 2006 real estate crash and the recession that followed, is another example. It looks as if this will be one of the hot topics in the upcoming presidential campaigns. The Democrat and Republican Party representatives sent to the talk shows appear to be more concerned with affixing blame on each other than on presenting the American people with an accurate understanding of what happened.
Elizabeth Warren, for example, argues in a bristling manner that Republicans and powerful banking interests are the villains in the piece. She insists the economic crisis was brought on by Republican schemes “to enrich wealthy donors” at the expense of the poor by “deregulating the banks”; that African-American and Hispanic families were “targeted” by wealthy bankers and the Republican politicians on the take who provided the bankers with a bailout when the poor were unable to repay their loans.
She calls for greater government regulation over the banks to make sure this never happens again. Hillary Clinton has made this argument a central theme in her campaign for the presidency.
The Republican response? Larry Kudlow insists in a recent syndicated column that “the seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during the Clinton presidency” when current New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was Clinton’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Kudlow maintains that Cuomo and the Clinton team pressured banks to make risky loans to unqualified buyers, in an attempt to get support from minorities in the upcoming presidential election, that HUD “gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in credit-deprived areas,” rewarding them “for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at a high risk of defaulting.”
When housing prices went down? The “lower-income folks,” Kudlow continues, “who really could not afford these mortgages under normal credit standards suffered massive foreclosures and personal bankruptcies.” They lost their homes and went into debt. But the Democrats got their votes anyway, along with the votes of “compassionate” Americans who admired this attempt by Democrats to get poorer Americans into a home of their own.
Returning to our theme: Am I saying that Warren, Cuomo, and Kudlow might also agree on a reasonable common ground if someone could get them together over a beer or a cup of coffee, with no television cameras around? Well, maybe not these three. Their ideological commitments are second nature to them. We might have to administer some truth serum in this case.
Because there is a reasonable common ground in this controversy, one that we, as voters, should keep in mind when we hear the partisan shouting about “corrupt bankers” and “crony capitalists” over the coming months. We are entitled to come to our own conclusion about whether the Republicans or the Democrats make more sense on economic issues, but we should know what the opposition stands for, not a crass caricature of their position.
And what is the common ground? That what Kudlow says happened, happened; but that it need not have been caused by “corruption” or “pandering to the poor” by the Democrats for votes. My hunch is that a dose of truth serum would get Andrew Cuomo to concede that the Clinton administration did indeed knowingly pressure banks to make risky loans to poor minorities.
Why would they do that, other than for crass political purposes? No doubt there were some in the Clinton administration who were engaged in unprincipled vote-buying. There are people like that, in all political parties. But I’ll bet the ranch that there were also those who were arguing behind closed doors that there was nothing wrong with handing out loans to poor people who likely would be unable to repay them — because in a matter of a few months that would not be the case.
The Clinton team was banking on the boom in housing prices to continue. The late 1990s and early 2000s were the years when many of us saw the value of our homes skyrocket.
Clinton’s and Cuomo’s plan was to find a way to permit poor minorities to get in on the real estate boom. Their scheme was to deliberately give the poor mortgages beyond their ability to repay by prevailing guidelines. But their presumption was that once the value of their home rose, the new homeowners could either refinance and get a mortgage they would be able to handle, or sell their home and make a profit. What could go wrong? There were not many who were predicting a collapse in the housing market in those days.
On the contrary, the conventional wisdom at the time was to “get in” to a home even if the price and the monthly mortgage payments seemed beyond your means. The rise in home prices, the knowledgeable people assured us, would “make you whole.” It was a strategy that worked for millions of Americans, including, I would wager, many readers of this column.
The strategy did not work for everyone. Hence the subprime mortgage crisis. There were people who bought “at the top” of the housing market. I know some of them. The collapse of the housing market hit them hard. They were left owing more to the bank on their house than it was worth, “upside-down” on their loans, as the saying went. The poor minorities who got the loans pushed by Andrew Cuomo and the Clintons were in that category.
But the point is — whatever you think of Cuomo and the Clintons — it was not what Cuomo and the Clintons thought would happen. They thought they would be heroes.
If so, why would it take truth serum to get Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren to admit this? Because they know that their political opponents would slam them. You know the words that would be used: “liberal hubris,” “governmental overreach,” “irresponsible bureaucrats.” It can be argued whether it would be fair for their opponents to do hit them with those charges, but not that it would not happen. Sean Hannity would be merciless and relentless.
Consider what we are asking liberal Democrats to say in public: “Yes, we caused the subprime mortgage crisis, but it was a well-intentioned honest mistake.” It is not going to happen, even if making such an admission would cast them in a better light than their conservative critics would prefer.
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