The Wright Side of the Brain

By HEATHER MAC DONALD

The list of Afrocentric "educators" whom the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since Sunday is a disturbing reminder that academia's follies can enter the public world in harmful ways. Now the pressing question is whether they have entered Barack Obama's worldview as well.

Some in Mr. Wright's crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as "authentically black." That their ideas have ended up in the pulpit of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ and in Detroit's Cobo Hall, where Mr. Wright spoke at the NAACP's Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, reminds us that bad ideas must be fought at their origins — and at every moment thereafter.

At the NAACP meeting, Mr. Wright proudly propounded the racist contention that blacks have inherently different "learning styles," correctly citing as authority for this view Janice Hale of Wayne State University. Pursuing a Ph.D. by logging long hours in the dusty stacks of a library, Mr. Wright announced, is "white." Blacks, by contrast, cannot sit still in class or learn from quiet study, and they have difficulty learning from "objects" — books, for example — but instead learn from "subjects," such as rap lyrics on the radio. These differences are neurological, according to Ms. Hale and Mr. Wright: Whites use what Mr. Wright referred to as the "left-wing, logical and analytical" side of their brains, whereas blacks use their "right brain," which is "creative and intuitive." When he was of school age in Philadelphia following the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation decision, Mr. Wright said, his white teachers "freaked out because the black children did not stay in their place, over there, behind the desk." Instead, the students "climbed up all over [the teachers], because they learned from a 'subject,' not an 'object.' " How one learns from a teacher as "subject" by climbing on her, as opposed to learning from her as "object" — by listening to her words — is a mystery.

One would hope that Mr. Wright's audience was offended by the idea that acting out in class is authentically black — it was impossible to tell what the reaction in the hall was to the assertion. But one thing is clear: Embracing the notion that blacks shouldn't be expected to listen attentively to instruction is guaranteed to perpetuate into eternity the huge learning gap between blacks on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.

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Mr. Wright also praised the work of Geneva Smitherman of Michigan State University, who has called for the selective incorporation of Ebonics into the curriculum in order to validate the black experience. Mr. Wright gave another shout-out to the late Asa Hilliard of Georgia State University, who told us, Mr. Wright said, "how to fix the schools." Like Ms. Hale, Mr. Hilliard argued that disrupting the classroom through "impulsive interrupting and loud talking" is inherently black. His bogus Afrocentrism, propounded in his "African-American Baseline Essays," metastasized in educational circles during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Mr. Hilliard argued that Western civilization was at once stolen from black Africa and crippling to black identity. As the late Arthur M. Schlesinger recounted in his 1991 alarum about multiculturalism, "The Disuniting of America," Mr. Hilliard urged schools to teach black students that Egypt was a black country; that Africans invented birth control and carbon steel; that they discovered America long before Columbus did; that Robert Browning and Ludwig von Beethoven were "Afro-European"; and that the Atlantic Ocean was originally named the Ethiopian Ocean. (City College of New York laughingstock Leonard Jeffries—he of the infamous distinction between materialistic, aggressive European "ice people" and superior African "sun people"—contributed to Mr. Hilliard's book of essays, asserting therein that slavery was undertaken as "part of a conspiracy to prevent us from having a unified experience.")

Approving of self-destructive behavior in school is just one part of the vast academic project to justify black underclass dysfunction. The academy has also singled out crime as authentically black, another poisonous idea that Mr. Wright appears to have embraced. In his NAACP speech, he mocked the tendency of "those of us who never got caught" to treat "those of us who are incarcerated" with disrespect. In other words, we all commit crime, but only some of us get nabbed for it.

This leveling argument recalls the bizarre doctrines of University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin. In a widely reprinted California Law Review article from 1992, Ms. Austin asserted that the black community should embrace the criminals in its midst as a form of resistance to white oppression. People of color should view "hustling" as a "good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking." Examples of hustling include "clerks in stores [who] cut their friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their contraband around the neighborhood." It never occurs to Ms. Austin that these black thieves may have black employers who suffer the effects of crime — as do the larger neighborhoods of which they form the essential fabric. Officially incorporating crime into the black identity, as Ms. Austin and Mr. Wright do, is a pathetic admission of defeat and marginalization.

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To understand how such ideas become mainstream, one need only read the front page of yesterday's New York Times. There, television critic Alessandra Stanley thrills to the authentic voice of black America: Mr. Wright "went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics," Ms. Stanley effuses. "Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama's former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous." One might think that Mr. Wright's promotion of the idea that black kids can't sit still in class would raise some worries, even in a television critic. Surely Ms. Stanley would expect her own children to listen to their teachers. But the white elite's desire to avoid charges of racism cancels out all reasonable reactions to dangerous nonsense when such nonsense comes out of black mouths. The coverage of Mr. Wright's speeches beyond the Times has been just as silent about their crackpot Afrocentric pedagogy, meekly following the agenda that Mr. Wright set by asking instead whether the black church, and not Mr. Wright, was under attack.

Mr. Wright's speeches have shown how quickly academic insanity becomes incorporated into practice. And now we may be on the verge of seeing such madness spread into the White House. The mainstream media have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into questioning Mr. Obama's affiliation with Mr. Wright. By now, Mr. Wright's 9/11 and AIDS diatribes are well-worn — and Mr. Obama's repudiation of them a no-brainer. It is imperative that someone ask Mr. Obama whether he, too, believes that the way to "fix the schools" is through Afrocentric curricula and double standards in student discipline, and whether he, too, believes that blacks only think with the "right side" of their brains.

Political Diary

Queenfish

If Hillary Clinton loses in North Carolina tonight, it will not have been for lack of effort to pander to her audiences.

First, came the accent. Often ridiculed for adopting a Southern twang when south of the Mason-Dixon line, Mrs. Clinton hauled out her best local pronunciation in her campaign stops. "It's time to quit wringin' our hands and start rollin' up our sleeves," she told a crowd at High Point this past weekend. The town's name rolled off her tongue sounding like "Hah Point."

China-bashing, always popular in a state that has lost many textile jobs, was a staple of her stump speech. She claimed China was no longer a trading partner and had become "our trading master." She said Beijing had cheated Americans out of jobs and "sends us back lead-based toys, contaminated pet food and polluted pharmaceuticals. This is going to end when I am president of the United States," she shouted.

Mr. Obama was implausibly portrayed as both out of touch and a tool of the oil companies. "Senator Obama wants you to pay the gas tax this summer instead of trying to get the oil companies to pay it out of their record profits," she told her listeners. She also criticized him for refusing to back her call for a freeze on home foreclosures, a step many economists say would be ruinous to the housing market. His failure, she said, just proved Mr. Obama's unwillingness to "take on the Wall Street bankers and mortgage companies that misled so many people into these sub-prime mortgages."

Team Obama is aghast at the audacity of the Clinton machine's tactics in the Tar Heel State. Buoyed by 92% support from African-American voters, they still expect to win. But if Mr. Obama loses, it will once again prove the potency of good, ol' fashioned demagoguery.

-- John Fund

Hillary and the Bush Voter
Can Hillary Clinton win the Democratic presidential nomination on the back of Bush voters? Today in North Carolina, she may find out.

The Tar Heel State has become a key state for the former First Lady. With a large black population and sandwiched between two southern states Barack Obama has already won handily, her rival was once expected to win by a wide margin. If Mrs. Clinton can pull off an upset, it would transform the dynamics of the Democratic nomination race and immeasurably strengthen her appeal to the superdelegates. Though behind in overall fundraising, Mrs. Clinton has pulled out the stops and is outspending Mr. Obama in North Carolina. She also made the strategic decision to focus her time exclusively there in the campaign's final days, rather than in Indiana, where Democrats also are voting today.

Any upset, however, would likely depend on mobilizing voters who pulled the lever for George W. Bush four years ago. Under Democratic Party rules, the bulk of the state's delegates will be handed out proportionally based on how the two candidates perform in 13 districts. Congressional Quarterly did a close analysis and found that the former First Lady is running strongest in districts that have a lot of Bush voters, such as the districts that include the Army's Fort Bragg and the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune. Based on polling, the magazine still expects Mr. Obama to walk away with a slight lead in delegates (40 to 37) – partly because Democratic Party rules assign fewer delegates to districts that voted heavily for Republican presidential candidates.

But Mr. Obama tends to perform slightly better in polls than he does on Election Day. Another wild card is North Carolina's "open primary," in which the state's 21% of "unaffiliated" voters can vote in either party's primary. Today's outcome may well come down to whether Mrs. Clinton can convince enough conservative Southerners – who have tended to vote Republican for national office, but who have also voted for Gov. Mike Easley (a Clinton endorser) and other Democrats at the state level – to turn out for Hillary.

-- Brendan Miniter

Quote of the Day
"[W]hen I hear people say let's bring the troops home and end the war, good God, it's not going to end the war. I think it's going to give you a war of significantly increased proportions. I remember how we reacted to Rwanda. How could we have let that happen? Why didn't we step in? Why didn't we get the international community engaged? Well, you know, what if you have a humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq and it's not a question of why didn't we step in, it's we stepped out. How is that going to affect people?"

-- Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Next Stop, Hamas
Fresh from his presidential campaign and his splashy endorsement of Barack Obama, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has now been to Venezuela to meet with President Hugo Chávez and seek the release of three Americans held hostage by Colombian guerrillas.

Mr. Chávez clearly enjoyed the role he was asked to play as the magnanimous host, empathetic listener and potentially heroic intermediary. For his part, Mr. Richardson undoubtedly relished the chance to continue playing on a global stage, compared to which administering the state of New Mexico must seem unglamorous. Unfortunately, the only thing his trip accomplished was to clarify why the governor's bid for the U.S. presidency flopped.

For starters, Mr. Richardson came off looking ignorant about the realities of Venezuela. Intelligence agencies have long known that the FARC, which is holding the American hostages, makes a good part of its income by running illegal drugs through Venezuela. If Mr. Chávez wants to force the FARC to hand over the hostages, he needs only to threaten to cut off its transit routes.

He won't do that, of course, because he is ideologically, tactically and strategically wedded to the FARC. On his return to the U.S., Mr. Richardson only further advertised his ignorance by explaining to the media that negotiation was "difficult" because "you're dealing with a rebel group that's out in the jungle. You don't know where they are. You don't know what they want."

Huh? As the world knows, a captured laptop belonging to slain rebel leader Raul Reyes has already exposed not only the extent of Mr. Chávez's complicity with the Colombian rebels – he obviously knows how to communicate with them – but also what FARC is seeking in exchange for the hostages, namely a safe haven inside Venezuela where they can build bombs, store weapons and otherwise plan for attacks on civilians.

Mr. Richardson may want to position himself in U.S. politics as a cool Hispanic statesman with a sophisticated understanding of the region. But after this trip, he's looking like just one more naïve gringo.

The Housing Crisis Is Over

By CYRIL MOULLE-BERTEAUX

The dire headlines coming fast and furious in the financial and popular press suggest that the housing crisis is intensifying. Yet it is very likely that April 2008 will mark the bottom of the U.S. housing market. Yes, the housing market is bottoming right now.

How can this be? For starters, a bottom does not mean that prices are about to return to the heady days of 2005. That probably won't happen for another 15 years. It just means that the trend is no longer getting worse, which is the critical factor.

Most people forget that the current housing bust is nearly three years old. Home sales peaked in July 2005. New home sales are down a staggering 63% from peak levels of 1.4 million. Housing starts have fallen more than 50% and, adjusted for population growth, are back to the trough levels of 1982.

Furthermore, residential construction is close to 15-year lows at 3.8% of GDP; by the fourth quarter of this year, it will probably hit the lowest level ever. So what's going to stop the housing decline? Very simply, the same thing that caused the bust: affordability.

The boom made housing unaffordable for many American families, especially first-time home buyers. During the 1990s and early 2000s, it took 19% of average monthly income to service a conforming mortgage on the average home purchased. By 2005 and 2006, it was absorbing 25% of monthly income. For first time buyers, it went from 29% of income to 37%. That just proved to be too much.

Prices got so high that people who intended to actually live in the houses they purchased (as opposed to speculators) stopped buying. This caused the bubble to burst.

Since then, house prices have fallen 10%-15%, while incomes have kept growing (albeit more slowly recently) and mortgage rates have come down 70 basis points from their highs. As a result, it now takes 19% of monthly income for the average home buyer, and 31% of monthly income for the first-time home buyer, to purchase a house. In other words, homes on average are back to being as affordable as during the best of times in the 1990s. Numerous households that had been priced out of the market can now afford to get in.

The next question is: Even if home sales pick up, how can home prices stop falling with so many houses vacant and unsold? The flip but true answer: because they always do.

In the past five major housing market corrections (and there were some big ones, such as in the early 1980s when home sales also fell by 50%-60% and prices fell 12%-15% in real terms), every time home sales bottomed, the pace of house-price declines halved within one or two months.

The explanation is that by the time home sales stop declining, inventories of unsold homes have usually already started falling in absolute terms and begin to peak out in "months of supply" terms. That's the case right now: New home inventories peaked at 598,000 homes in July 2006, and stand at 482,000 homes as of the end of March. This inventory is equivalent to 11 months of supply, a 25-year high – but it is similar to 1974, 1982 and 1991 levels, which saw a subsequent slowing in home-price declines within the next six months.

Inventories are declining because construction activity has been falling for such a long time that home completions are now just about undershooting new home sales. In a few months, completions of new homes for sale could be undershooting new home sales by 50,000-100,000 annually.

Inventories will drop even faster to 400,000 – or seven months of supply – by the end of 2008. This shift in inventories will have a significant impact on prices, although house prices won't stop falling entirely until inventories reach five months of supply sometime in 2009. A five-month supply has historically signaled tightness in the housing market.

Many pundits claim that house prices need to fall another 30% to bring them back in line with where they've been historically. This is usually based on an analysis of house prices adjusted for inflation: Real house prices are 30% above their 40-year, inflation-adjusted average, so they must fall 30%. This simplistic analysis is appealing on the surface, but is flawed for a variety of reasons.

Most importantly, it neglects the fact that a great majority of Americans buy their houses with mortgages. And if one buys a house with a mortgage, the most important factor in deciding what to pay for the house is how much of one's income is required to be able to make the mortgage payments on the house. Today the rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage is 5.7%. Back in 1981, the rate hit 18.5%. Comparing today's house prices to the 1970s or 1980s, when mortgage rates were stratospheric, is misguided and misleading.

This is all good news for the broader economy. The housing bust has been subtracting a full percentage point from GDP for almost two years now, which is very large for a sector that represents less than 5% of economic activity.

When the rate of house-price declines halves, there will be a wholesale shift in markets' perceptions. All of a sudden, the expected value of the collateral (i.e. houses) for much of the lending that went on for the past decade will change. Right now, when valuing the collateral, market participants including banks are extrapolating the current pace of house price declines for another two to three years; this has a significant impact on the amount of delinquencies, foreclosures and credit losses that lenders are expected to face.

More home sales and smaller price declines means fewer homeowners will be underwater on their mortgages. They will thus have less incentive to walk away and opt for foreclosure.

A milder house-price decline scenario could lead to increases in the market value of a lot of the securitized mortgages that have been responsible for $300 billion of write-downs in the past year. Even if write-backs do not occur, stabilizing collateral values will have a huge impact on the markets' perception of risk related to housing, the financial system, and the economy.

We are of course experiencing a serious housing bust, with serious economic consequences that are still unfolding. The odds are that the reverberations will lead to subtrend growth for a couple of years. Nonetheless, housing led us into this credit crisis and this recession. It is likely to lead us out. And that process is underway, right now.

The Mystery of Political Charisma

By JOSEPH S. NYE JR.

The press tells us that Barack Obama has "charisma," the special power of a person to inspire fascination and loyalty. But does charisma originate in the individual, in the followers, or in the situation? Academic studies say all three.

Charisma proves surprisingly hard to identify in advance. A survey by the psychologist Boas Shamir concluded that "relatively little" is known about who charismatic leaders are. Dick Morris, the political consultant, reports that in his experience, "charisma is the most elusive of political traits because it doesn't exist in reality; only in our perception once a candidate has made it by hard work and good issues." Similarly, the business press has described many CEOs as "charismatic" when things go well, only to withdraw the label after the executives fail to make their numbers.

Political scientists have tried to create charisma scales that predict votes or presidential ratings, but they have not proven fruitful. John F. Kennedy is often described as charismatic, but obviously not for everyone. He failed to capture a majority of the popular vote in his 1960 presidential election, and his ratings varied during his presidency. Lyndon Johnson lamented that he lacked charisma. That was true of his relations with the broad public, but he could be magnetic and overwhelming in personal contacts. One careful study of presidential rhetoric by political scientist George C. Edwards found that even such famed orators as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan could not count on charisma alone to pass their programs.

Charisma is more easily identified after the fact. In that sense, the concept is circular and a little like ancient Chinese emperors, who had "the mandate of heaven." They were seen to have a mandate if they ruled, but to have lost that mandate if they were overthrown.

Similarly, success is often used to prove – after the fact – that a modern political leader has charisma. It is much harder to use charisma to predict who will be a successful leader.

Followers are more likely to attribute charisma to leaders when they feel a strong need for change, often in the context of a personal, organizational or social crisis. For example, the British public did not see Winston Churchill as a charismatic leader in 1939, but a year later, his vision, confidence and communications skills made him charismatic in the eyes of the British people, given the anxieties they felt after the fall of France to the Nazis and the Dunkirk evacuation. Yet by 1945, when the public turned from winning the war to building the welfare state, Churchill was voted out of office. His charisma did not predict his defeat. The change in voters' needs was a better predictor.

In practice, the word charisma is a vague synonym for "personal magnetism." People vary in their ability to attract others, and their attraction depends in part on inherent traits, in part on learned skills, and in part on social context. Some dimensions of attraction, such as appearances and nonverbal communication, can be tested. Various studies show that people who are rated as attractive are treated more favorably than unattractive people. One study finds a handsome man enjoys an edge over an ugly rival that is worth 6%-8% of the vote. For women, the edge is close to 10 points.

Nonverbal signals account for a major part of human communications, and simple experiments have shown that some people communicate nonverbally better than others. A Princeton study found that when people were shown images of two candidates in unfamiliar elections, they could predict the winners seven times out of 10. And a similar Harvard study that showed people 10-second silent video clips in 58 elections found their guesses better at predicting outcomes than general economic conditions, which are often regarded as a strong indicator.

In the end, Barack Obama's charisma is in the eyes of his followers. Voters should be aware that charisma tells them something about a candidate, but even more about themselves, the mood of the country, and their desire for change.

Mr. Nye, a visiting professor at Oxford University, serves on the board of directors of the Belfer Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is author of the recently published "The Powers to Lead" (Oxford University Press).