For a lunch escape from the office, I headed for a local fast-food joint with a copy of the Washington Post’s Super Tuesday roundups, complete with an appetite-destroying picture of a victorious John McCain on the front. Unfolding before me in the line was a scene typical of the new multicultural America: A trim, expensive-but-casually dressed white male in his late 30’s or early 40’s was demanding nutrition information from the Hispanic woman behind the counter.

I didn’t catch all the details, but it had to do with corn-based versus wheat-based, or something like that. From the words and tone, it sounded like a persnickety yuppie health concern. As you might expect, the woman behind the counter spoke practically no English. The man angrily demanded a manager. No manager here, the woman said. The man huffed, turned on his heel, and stormed out.

It was a small vignette, but so telling about our times. Here was this obviously well-educated white man, likely liberal-leaning, with concerns about food ingredients that would baffle any resident of the Third World, happy as they would be to get any food, much less gluten-free food. I’ll guess he’s not concerned about immigration, legal or otherwise (but even if he is, let’s more safely assume there’s a huge body of liberal whites out there with big concerns about carbon footprints and glutens who simultaneously denounce as bigoted anyone concerned about immigration). His little food concern evaporates in the world of non-English-speaking people. Does he–or those like him–make the connection? That precious little world of expensive coffees, L’Occitane and Saabs is but a delicate flower crushed under the heel of an advancing onslaught.

Could this be a new rallying cry? Save liberalism: stop immigration.

The nations’s political class is making threats to mortgage companies whom they blame for lending poor and minority homebuyers more money than they could pay back, or in some cases, simply more than they wanted to pay back.

Back in August, John Edwards was blaming lenders for the fact that minorities pay more for mortgages because they have worse credit scores.

There’s now a New York Post article called The Real Scandal | How Feds Invited The Mortgage Mess, [February 5, 2008]By Stan Liebowitz, a Texas professor of Economics who’s been analyzing this phenomenon for some time. He writes

At the crisis’ core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards - no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant’s ability to make payments; no down payment.

Most people instinctively understand that such loans are likely to be unsound. But how did the heavily-regulated banking industry end up able to engage in such foolishness?

From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards - at the behest of community groups and “progressive” political forces.

The answer goes back to a Boston Fed study in the Nineties that concluded that blacks were discriminated against,using a version of “disparate impact” theory, the same theory that holds that if blacks have lower average scores than whites on a written test, it’s the test that’s at fault.

According to Liebowitz,

No sooner had the ink dried on its discrimination study than the Boston Fed, clearly speaking for the entire Fed, produced a manual for mortgage lenders stating that: “discrimination may be observed when a lender’s underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants.”

Some of these “outdated” criteria included the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, credit history, savings history and income verification. Instead, the Boston Fed ruled that participation in a credit-counseling program should be taken as evidence of an applicant’s ability to manage debt.

Sound crazy? You bet. Those “outdated” standards existed to limit defaults. But bank regulators required the loosened underwriting standards, with approval by politicians and the chattering class.

So instead of politicians like John McCain talking about “greedy people on Wall Street who need to go to jail,” they should be talking about “stupid and evil people on Capitol Hill who need to get a real job.”

If you want to know what lending was like in 1992 befeor the Fed rewrote the rule book, you need to read an article called The Hidden Clue By Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer, first published in Forbes, Jan 4, 1993. This established that in the absence of federal civil rights nagging, banks were as happy to lend to blacks as to whites, given an equal chance of repayment. The hidden clue of the title was the default rates, which were the same for blacks as for whites, showing that they were being held to the same color-blind standards.

Given that minorities are supposed to be the main victims of this “predatory lending” nonsense, this must be no longer true.

More from Mickey Kaus:

29%: Did Latinos really make up 29% of California Democratic voters, and blacks only 6%? Those are the numbers from the exit polls you hear bandied about–but there appear be some doubters. … In the 2004 Dem primary–admittedly, not an early and exciting contest like this years–the figures were 16% Latino, 8% black, notes Blumenthal. How did the African American share go down with Obama in the race? … Update: Are missing absentee ballots the explanation? …

There’s more, including a valuable anecdote indicating lack of Latino interest in voting. There are a lot of Latinos in California, but many are non-citizens, and don’t vote even in general elections, let alone primaries. Those immigrants who are citizens don’t vote that much either. The Hispanic voting share declined in 2004.When they do vote, of course, they tend to vote Democratic. That’s why Sam Francis wrote in 2003 that Whites, Not Hispanics, Are The Swing Vote In California. Are Republican strategists listening?

Mickey Kaus reports

Bye, Bye Immigration? I’ve now heard two Latino commentators–an NPR academic and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa–argue that it’s mistaken to try to appeal to Latinos only through the issue of immigration, Latinos also care deeply about schools, economic development, etc.Now they tell us! For years we’ve been hearing little except the argument that anyone who doesn’t deliver on “comprehensive immigration reform” was going to lose the crucial sleeping giant ethnic swing vote for a generation. Suddenly it’s ‘Don’t be condescending. There are other ways to win over Hispanics.’ Glad to hear it.Obama’s double-bubble trouble. - By Mickey Kaus - Slate Magazine

The larger point her is that what Villaraigosa means is that an American politician can only win the Mexican-American vote by being a Democrat. The issues that Hispanic voters care about are all government spending issues, plus a certain amount of bilingualism and racial preferences. But even leaving the specific racial and language issues aside, the issues they’re for are the issues the Reagan Coalition and 1994 Congressional Republicans fought against. See Why The Majority Of Mexican Immigrants Are Not Going To Vote For The GOP by Allan Wall for details. And that means that only one political party .can benefit from Hispanic immigration in the long run, and that’s the Democrats

Here’s the exit poll from the GOP race in California, which shows just how crucial Mitt Romney’s public conversion in 2006-2007 to immigration restrictionism was to his having even a chance in this race. Man, people just don’t like Plastic Fantastic Man. Without the 29% of the voters who called illegal immigration the most important issue, among whom Romney beat McCain 45%-25%, Romney wouldn’t have finished second, he would have been tarred and feathered and run out of California on a rail.

Heck, among the 33% of voters who identified the economy as the most important issue (a not surprising choice on a day when the Dow dropped 370 points), McCain beat Romney 48%-27%, even though Yosemite Sam has seldom paid any attention to the economy. Overall, Romney beat McCain 35%-32% among voters who think “Issues” are most important in deciding their vote, while getting clobbered by McCain 49%-26% among those voting on “Personal Qualities.”[See table here.]

The Dow Jones average drops 370 points on Tuesday on new evidence of a recession in the offing, and the Bush Administration announces a plan to “dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops.” I was thinking that maybe some of those newly unemployed construction workers might want farm jobs, but, apparently, the eternal need for more foreign peasants comes first. Otherwise, we would all starve.

The LA Times reports:

The Bush administration today plans to announce the most significant overhaul in two decades of the nation’s agricultural guest worker program, in a bid to dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops.

The revised regulations, many months in the works, would make it easier for growers to bring foreign workers to the United States and could alleviate the critical farmworker shortage largely caused by the U.S. crackdown on illegal border crossings. …

The greatest effect would be in California, the nation’s largest agricultural state. Some farmers have had to plow rotting crops back into their fields for lack of workers at harvest time. But lawmakers and growers said Tuesday that more than an administrative fix was needed to solve the state’s chronic farm labor shortages.

Don’t you love that phrase “chronic farm labor shortage”? It’s like golf course owners complaining about the chronic daylight shortage that keeps golf courses closed an average of 12 hours per day and demanding that therefore the government must build them giant floodlights so they can stay open 24 hours per day. There is no farm labor shortage, chronic or otherwise, there’s just a higher market wage than the wage the growers would prefer to pay (which, by the way, is $0.00 per hour).

And as for crops rotting in the fields, it’s the nature of the agriculture business that each year a few of the many scores of different crops will grow in such abundance or at an inconvenient time or both that it’s not worth harvesting some of them. In 2006, for example, it was pears. So, each fall, the growers’ lobbyists issue press releases about how pears or brussels sprouts or avocados or whatever it is this year are “rotting in the fields” due to the horrible burden of having to pay stoop laborers in expensive California $8.50 an hour (or whatever it is) for seasonal work.

The more long-range appeal to growers of guest-worker plans is that it lets them bring in Asian peasants who are less able to sneak into the country than Mexican peasants, while allowing the Mexicans to continue to sneak in. (Did you know the population of Indonesia, for instance, is 235 million?) From the employers’ standpoint, it’s a double your pleasure, double your fun approach to the supply and demand determination of laborers’ wages. And then once the flow of guest workers from, say, Indonesia gets started, their will be more illegal immigration from Indonesia too, since the guest workers’ relatives will now have connections in America.

Mitt Romney won big in a couple of purplish states with well-educated, civic-minded electorates: Colorado (59%-19%) and Minnesota (42%-22%-20%). Those are respectable wins.

But … both were caucus states rather than primaries. And I’m starting to get suspicious.

That seems to be a pattern — Romney does well in caucuses and loses in primaries. Before today, he won caucuses in Wyoming, Nevada, and Maine, and a primary in his “home” state of Michigan. Perhaps that’s just because the more dedicated, public affairs-oriented individuals who show up at caucuses have carefully assessed each candidate’s positions and resumes and made a responsible choice for Romney.

Or maybe … it’s because Mormons keep packing the caucuses.

Unfortunately, I can’t find exit polls for Colorado and Minnesota, but we do know that Romney’s victory in the Nevada caucus was boosted by Mormons making up 25% of the GOP caucusers and going close to 100% for Romney. So, I have my suspicions about his other caucus victories. If anybody has any evidence one way or another, let me know.

Oh, wait, Romney did do really, really well in one primary today, where he got 90% of the vote, so maybe my suspicions are paranoid.

Except … that state was Utah.

Mormons–they’d take over the world in a couple more generations … if only they were allowed to drink caffeinated beverages!

This is not to say that Mormons can’t be dedicated, public affairs-oriented individuals. In fact, I would expect that they are a little above average in this regard. It’s just that the discreet charm of Mitt Romney just seems to be a little too discreet to win many elections where Mormons don’t make up a sizable fraction of the voters.

In other states today, Romney won in caucuses in Alaska (44%) and in primaries in Montana (38%), North Dakota (36%), and in his “home” state of Massachusetts with 51%. That’s a little better than McCain’s 47% in his home state of Arizona, but not as good as Huckabee’s 61% in Arkansas. In contrast, Obama won 64% in Illinois and Clinton 57% in New York. So, to know McCain and Romney is apparently not to love them.

Longtime reader Ben Franklin (since 1706) comments:

On Super Tuesday, McCain won almost exclusively in states that Republicans have almost no chance of winning in November. The only clear exceptions to that are Oklahoma and Missouri, the later where McCain has won with just 33 percent of the vote and with 3 or 4 percent separating McCain, Huckabee and Romney. In Oklahoma, McCain won in a state that has as its law one of the most stringent anti-illegal immigrant laws in the country. So, both of those wins are incongruous.

In the rest of the states McCain won, there is pretty much Zero chance for the Republican nominee to win in the general election in the fall.

As for Huckabee, he won in Southern states that just about ANY Republican candidate will win come November.

So however you look at the results, they mean less then they appear to mean. This also applies to Obama, who won in many states that the Democrat nominee has next to no chance to win, except for Illinois, which is in the bag for the Democrats (and is Obama’s “home state”). So, Obama’s big delegate count on Super Tuesday is vastly overstated, what with his winning North Dakota, Utah, Idaho, etc.

I’d say that Hillary comes out of Super Tuesday looking like by far the strongest candidate in the field of either party.

The electoral college means that purple states are what matters: the Great Lakes Blue Collar States of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Clean Green States of Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico (okay, NM isn’t green and it isn’t clean in its politics, but I had to put it somewhere), and then there’s Florida, which wasn’t that close in 2004 but we all remember 2000.

Surprisingly few purple states participated in Super Tuesday. In Minnesota, Obama won big with 67% of the caucuses, while Romney beat McCain and Huckabee 42-22-20. Hillary won New Mexico 51-42, while the Republicans in that state didn’t hold an election. (Getting off the topic here, don’t you find it annoying when the parties in a state hold their primaries on different days?)<

One place to find exit poll data is to go here:http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/

Then Control-F for “exit” then click on the state you want on the map. Then look for the link to “Full … Exit Poll.”

This is all part of my ongoing effort to get my readers to do my work for me.

Here, for example, are the race demographics of Democratic voters in California:

[See table here.]

Hillary won 80% of California’s Democratic high school dropouts and 61% of the no-college high school grads. So, if Hillary wins California, it looks like it will be on the strength of the “Son of Aladdin” vote.

There’s no joy in the conservative/ Republican MSM/ blogosphere after Super Tuesday. The GOP is obviously profoundly divided, with little enthusiasm and the marked tendency to break along quarrelling tribal lines (Huckabee gets Southerners, Romney gets the Mormon-tinged Intermountain West) that I’ve noted before. American political parties are very hard to kill off, but the vital signs here are unmistakably not great. Thanks a lot, Dubya.

This matters, because even VDARE.COM’s Democrats are deeply pessimistic that their party will embrace patriotic immigration reform.

It’s possible, of course, that the GOP nominee may have learned from his experience in the primaries how powerful the immigration issue is, and exploit it in the general election. McCain is probably too pig-headed, but Huckabee has shown himself remarkably adaptable.

And it’s also true that a McCain-Clinton race is a perfect foil for Ron Paul, if he does make his rumored Third Party run - and is not scared off the immigration issue by the political correctness obviously endemic in the libertarian Establishment.

You have to marvel at the role luck plays in politics. Why didn’t two War On Terror types (McCain and Giuliani) take each other out rather than two Amnesty opponents (Romney and Huckabee)? (Why, for that matter, did Bush and not Reagan have political sons?)

And you have to acknowledge that the MSM’s ability to create celebrity candidates is still a force. But the internet has not yet begun to fight.

I stick with my conclusion yesterday: the big news is that immigration is showing up as an issue in opinion polls. Reluctantly, but increasingly, politicians will have to navigate around it. Probably in the end a new party will arise to deal with it.