HOUSTON—Anabel, a friend and life-long Republican, contacted me to report her increasing alarm over a trend that’s testing her party loyalty.

   Anabel is part of that fortunate class that isn’t hurting from this recession. She lives from investments and trust funds. Her social set is old money, but they are quite liberal and let in the nouveau riche. Advancing age frees them to think about what kind of world they want to leave behind.

   Did I say she is Republican?

   Near the end of a lunch with a handsome widower, Anabel heard bells go off, then an alarm, on the date that had otherwise been pleasant enough. She had just told him about having contributed to the McCain campaign but became disenchanted after Sarah Palin was selected as his VP candidate. The widower ripped into Anabel over last November’s election with a diatribe about race.

   She told me, “I wish I had paid for my own lunch.”

   Now you must know that Anabel is hardly the confrontational type. She’s from that swell ethic and civility that forces you to avoid letting it all hang out or telling someone off. They just take it. That’s what was churning at her. She was about to burst.

   This past summer one of her lady companions made Anabel come unglued with a rant about “the Obama conspiracy,” Anabel told me. We had a good laugh about how otherwise-very-smart people were falling for the Manchurian Candidate idea that “birthers” propagated.

   About that time, President Obama made light of it himself with a group of us reporters at the White House. When immigration reform came up, Obama said, “Some people think even I’m an illegal immigrant.”

   This humor may be lost on sourpusses who want to reengineer the truth to get another outcome, as happened with the notorious health care town-hall meetings. That, I decided, is what was bothering Anabel. She sees contortions, as viral as unbalanced-brain syndrome, are infecting her social circle.

   It happened that way with a lifelong friend who lives next door to her summer home. Such stable, church-going, pillars-of-the-community types report getting their news translations from talk-radio commentators.

   We have already witnessed that in the past, during the Joseph McCarthy era following World War II, when social elites, power elites, radio evangelists and others promoted anti-communist crusades. Later, otherwise sensible people went bonkers during racial desegregation, which spilled over into conspiracy theories about communists and agitators.  Even President Kennedy was referred to as part of a Catholic conspiracy to have the Pope take over the country.

   I proposed to Anabel all this was part of long tradition, as predictable as October scary movies, making the future sound so much worse than the past.

   Still, I wonder. President Obama’s notion of hope, although commendable, is only about setting things right after a reign of domestic policies that seem to have come from a frat animal house think tank.

   What follows after the ten pins are set upright?

   Senator Bob Menéndez’s book, “Growing American Roots: Why Our Nation Will Thrive as Our Largest Minority Flourishes,” is in the main a book in the repair-the-flat-tire tradition, except for one original chapter on how to engage Latin America. We would be savvy to recognize our national and global interests are increasingly in this hemisphere, it suggests.  Senator Menéndez makes it clear that “foreign affairs is the new frontier for Latinos.”

   That change may freak some of Anabel’s acquaintances into hysterics. But that’s better than having no future at all, which seems like what many want.

   [José de la Isla’s latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at [email protected].]

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