Wrong Way Billy extruded a thing called “The Character of Optimism,” in which he says he will remember Tony Snow more for his character than his career. Mr. Cohen wrote about “Scandinavia’s Scarred Mr. Dialogue,” and says Norway, a NATO ally, insists on engagement with enemies and has kept channels open to Hamas and Syria. It believes the United States and the West have lost opportunities by shunning them. Mr. Krugman gives us “Fannie, Freddie and You,” and says that while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in. Here’s that waste of oxygen Kristol:
The late Tony Snow — how odd it is to write “late” before Tony’s name, and how sad — was an editorial writer and columnist, the host of “Fox News Sunday” for seven years and of a radio talk show for three, and a speechwriter in the White House of the first president Bush and press secretary for the second. We were twice colleagues (at the first Bush White House and at Fox), and throughout our two decades together in Washington compatriots and friends.
I could easily dilate on Tony’s impressive achievements in journalism and government, and on the remarkable abilities and manifold talents that made his professional accomplishments possible.
But I’ll remember Tony Snow more for his character than his career. I’ll especially remember the calm courage and cheerful optimism he displayed in his last three years, in the face of his fatal illness.
For quite a while now, optimism has had a bad reputation in intellectual circles. The fashionable books of my youth — and they are good books — were darkly foreboding ones like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984.” Young conservatives of the era were much taken by Whittaker Chambers’s gloomy memoir, “Witness.” We who read Albert Camus — and if you had any pretensions to being a non-Marxist intellectual, you read Camus — loved the melancholy close of his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
The basic attitude one derived from these works was that pessimism is deeper than optimism, and existential angst more profound than cheerful confidence. This attitude remains powerful, perhaps dominant, among many thoughtful people today — perhaps especially among conservatives, reacting against a facile liberal belief in progress.
Tony Snow was a conservative. But he didn’t have a prejudice in favor of melancholy. His deep Christian faith combined with his natural exuberance to give him an upbeat world view. Watching him, and so admiring his remarkable strength of character in the last phase of his life, I came to wonder: Could it be that a stance of faith-grounded optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly pessimism or sophisticated fatalism?
Tony was one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet — kind, helpful and cheerful. But underlying these seemingly natural qualities was a kind of choice: the choice of gratitude. Tony thought we should be grateful for what life has given us, not bitter or anxious about what it hasn’t.
So he once wrote that “If you think Independence Day is America’s defining holiday, think again. Thanksgiving deserves that title, hands-down.” He believed that gratitude, not self-assertion, was the fundamental human truth, and that a recognition of this was one of the things that made America great.
After Tony’s cancer diagnosis and surgery in 2005, his faith deepened. So, amazingly, did his sense of gratitude. That doesn’t mean he accepted his illness, or the prospect of dying. He fought both. Above all, he didn’t want to leave his wife, Jill, and his three children.
Still, he understood the limits of human control. And, perhaps because of his faith, he found dying in a way life-enriching. As he wrote last year, “The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense.”
Tony once spoke at a dinner for journalists held in conjunction with the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Cal Thomas reported on Tony’s remarks: “After his first cancer surgery, Snow said, he had to stay in bed and he began reading the Bible more, ‘learning to pray’ and to ask God to ‘draw me closer, please, [which] develops a hunger that is also a form of joy.’ ” As this last sentence hints, Tony was an avid reader of C. S. Lewis.
In July 2001, Tony wrote a beautiful tribute to a friend and former Washington Times colleague, Ken Smith, who had died of cancer at age 44. Seven years later, the piece reads uncannily as if the subject were Tony himself.
Tony described his friend’s extraordinary grace as he suffered from a cruel and debilitating form of cancer. Ken “hated fussing over himself, and didn’t want to burden anybody” with his problems. He “accepted calmly the news that his cancer was incurable.” What’s more, “Ken never became bitter or morose. He didn’t milk his plight to elicit pity. He remained himself.” And “when it mattered, his virtues always dominated his vices.” Above all, “He used the light of his faith to dispel shadows of death.”
Tony concluded: “I find myself in the odd position of mourning less than I ought to because I feel so grateful that I got to know him at all. The world doesn’t produce as many nice guys as it should. Ditto for people who possess exemplary courage, strength, decency and faith. Ken got 44 years to show the rest of us how to brighten a life and a world.”
Tony got 53 years to show the rest of us how to brighten a life and a world. We should be grateful. But I can’t help being indignant that he didn’t have longer.
Somehow I think we’ll manage to soldier on, and that the Republic will survive without him. Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Oslo:
Scandinavia does reasonableness well, even when faced with unreason. The Oslo Accords of 1993 were as close as Israelis and Palestinians have come to looking each other in the eye, admitting neither side is going away, and jettisoning a bitter past for a better future.
The mediation habit stayed with Norway, despite Oslo’s collapse. Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian foreign minister, is a battle-hardened Mr. Dialogue. He took a personal terrorism course earlier this year while on a diplomatic mission to Afghanistan.
Store was in Kabul’s Serena Hotel on Jan. 14 when explosions and machine-gun fire erupted in the lobby, a flight of stairs above where he sat. Carsten Thomassen, a prominent Norwegian diplomatic correspondent covering his visit, was killed by terrorists linked to the Taliban. At least five other people died; one of Store’s media officials was gravely wounded.
The foreign minister was left with what he calls “anger and sadness.” But in the course of a conversation with Store, on the margins of the Oslo Forum, a meeting on conflict resolution that Norway hosts with the Geneva-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, it was less anger I felt from him than relentless reason.
Perhaps Store’s world view — that of a very critical NATO ally — is a good introduction to this post-unipolar moment, when the United States has bumped down to earth from its with-us-or-against-us apotheosis.
Store disapproves of the way the Bush Administration has conducted the war on terror. “This paradigm of the war on terror, connecting all kinds of armed resistance around the globe in one huge ideological framework, as a new ideology at a stage in history when most of the major ideologies are gone, does not reflect the facts on the ground,” he told me.
Norway’s message to the United States is blunt: the next administration, whether headed by Barack Obama or John McCain, should pronounce the war on terror over. Because it has tended to isolate the United States, polarize the world, inflate the enemy, conflate diverse movements and limit scope for dialogue, its time has passed.
“The way this has been framed, as an indefinite war that will last for decades, has impoverished our ability to understand the point of departure of the conflict and how we should deal with it,” Store said. “Engaging is not weakness, and by not talking the West has tended to give the upper hand to extremists on the other side.”
He continued: “Moderates lose ground if they cannot show tangible results. You don’t engage at any price, but the price can come down and we can achieve more.”
Norway has kept channels open to Hamas and to Syria. It has spoken with the Hamas leadership. It is convinced the West missed an opportunity by not talking in March 2007 to the elected Palestinian national unity government composed of Fatah and Hamas members. It argues that Taliban elements can be drawn out of terror into politics through talks.
In all of this, Norway has used the greater diplomatic latitude it enjoys as a non-member of the European Union. The E.U., like the United States, lists Hamas as a terrorist organization.
“We have enormous reason to be upset with Hamas because it spent every day after Oslo trying to destroy Oslo,” Store said. “But there is a strong realist tradition in Hamas oriented toward a political landscape. In general, it should be in our interest to get organizations out of military activity and into politics. The political working method has not been sufficiently tested.”
Engaging, he insisted, does not mean lowering of requirements. It can be a means to set yardsticks, hold interlocutors accountable, and probe their thinking while surrendering nothing.
“If Hamas wants to be part of the real world, it has to end up accepting Israel’s right to exist,” Store said. “The rest of the world will never yield on that.” It must also recognize the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of the mainstream Fatah movement, as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in negotiations.
For Norway, the Mecca accord of February 2007 came close enough to recognizing past Palestinian commitments to Israel for the West to begin rigorous engagement with Hamas. It chose another course and mayhem ensued.
Store believes a “revisiting has started in U.S. foreign policy in the direction of engagement” and this will “accelerate” under the next administration. “Part of this ideology of the war on terror has been the United States doing things by themselves,” he said. “Now we in Europe and Norway must expect to be more actively engaged by Washington.” That will bring demands as well as opportunities.
Engagement begins with allies. It can be extended to enemies. It cannot be deterred by bloodshed or personal loss. An Oslo stop is in order for America’s next president.
Here’s Mr. Krugman:
And now we’ve reached the next stage of our seemingly never-ending financial crisis. This time Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in the headlines, with dire warnings of imminent collapse. How worried should we be?
Well, I’m going to take a contrarian position: the storm over these particular lenders is overblown. Fannie and Freddie probably will need a government rescue. But since it’s already clear that that rescue will take place, their problems won’t take down the economy.
Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.
Here’s the background: Fannie Mae — the Federal National Mortgage Association — was created in the 1930s to facilitate homeownership by buying mortgages from banks, freeing up cash that could be used to make new loans. Fannie and Freddie Mac, which does pretty much the same thing, now finance most of the home loans being made in America.
The case against Fannie and Freddie begins with their peculiar status: although they’re private companies with stockholders and profits, they’re “government-sponsored enterprises” established by federal law, which means that they receive special privileges.
The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure, the federal government will come to their rescue.
This implicit guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized. If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits, but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win, tails we lose.
Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad risks, because the downside is someone else’s problem. The classic example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money. When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag. The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.
But here’s the thing: Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble.
Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.
So whatever bad incentives the implicit federal guarantee creates have been offset by the fact that Fannie and Freddie were and are tightly regulated with regard to the risks they can take. You could say that the Fannie-Freddie experience shows that regulation works.
In that case, however, how did they end up in trouble?
Part of the answer is the sheer scale of the housing bubble, and the size of the price declines taking place now that the bubble has burst. In Los Angeles, Miami and other places, anyone who borrowed to buy a house at the peak of the market probably has negative equity at this point, even if he or she originally put 20 percent down. The result is a rising rate of delinquency even on loans that meet Fannie-Freddie guidelines.
Also, Fannie and Freddie, while tightly regulated in terms of their lending, haven’t been required to put up enough capital — that is, money raised by selling stock rather than borrowing. This means that even a small decline in the value of their assets can leave them underwater, owing more than they own.
And yes, there is a real political scandal here: there have been repeated warnings that Fannie’s and Freddie’s thin capitalization posed risks to taxpayers, but the companies’ management bought off the political process, systematically hiring influential figures from both parties. While they were ugly, however, Fannie’s and Freddie’s political machinations didn’t play a significant role in causing our current problems.
Still, isn’t it shocking that taxpayers may end up having to rescue these institutions? Not really. We’re going through a major financial crisis — and such crises almost always end with some kind of taxpayer bailout for the banking system.
And let’s be clear: Fannie and Freddie can’t be allowed to fail. With the collapse of subprime lending, they’re now more central than ever to the housing market, and the economy as a whole.
