The people vs. the professors

(Denver Post, Oct. 24) "Beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept away from the levers of power. They should be objects of suspicion when they offer collective advice. Intellectuals habitually forget that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas." So writes British historian Paul Johnson on the last page of "Intellectuals," his 200-year survey of the damage done by brainy elites in public life. That was in 1988, and the hit parade hasn’t stopped. A sequel could chronicle Hillary Clinton's debacle as health-care czar, Al Gore's phony climate panic, the failed presidential candidacies of uber-smart guys Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, and Barack Obama learning the hard way that being president requires different skills than being, in Sarah Palin's words, "a professor at a lectern." Keynesian wonks, led by Larry Summers of Harvard, assured us that throwing a trillion or so at liberal pet projects would keep unemployment under 8 percent. IQ-meisters from all the right medical schools, tricked out in borrowed lab coats for the photo op, endorsed central planning for one-sixth of the economy, the better to keep us all healthy – until we flunk Rahm Emanuel’s brother’s cost-benefit test, at which time say goodbye.

From the massive wave of disillusionment at such policy quackery, reaching into the very core of Obama’s support – exemplified by Velma Hart, a woman, an African American, and a government employee, asking him on national TV, “Is this my new reality?” – comes the thundering electoral rebuke to his leadership that everyone now expects on Nov. 2. The Oz moment is over, and the unheroic little man behind the curtain is concealed no more.

The Tea Party movement is evidence of millions of Americans losing patience with the beneficent rule of enlightened experts that has been progressivism’s holy grail since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and raucously agreeing with Paul Johnson that “a dozen people picked at random on the street are as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia.” MORE likely, the Glenn Beck insurgents would roar, and they wouldn’t exempt the Republican intelligentsia either.

But here in Colorado, during an election that broadly pits the people vs. the professors, you’d have to say that Republican CU regent Steve Bosley, an aw-shucks businessman, is better positioned than Harvard grad and Boulder law prof Melissa Hart, his Democratic challenger, in their race for a term of six years in the at-large seat. He needs that edge, because she’s no lightweight, having won a 2008 campaign to block color-blind college admissions. And the right needs him, because the campus left has big plans if the GOP’s 5-4 majority is reversed.

According to a regents’ vote last February, “diversity of political perspectives… to ensure the rich interchange of ideas” is a guiding principle for the University of Colorado. CU’s website features a link to President Bruce Benson saying so. Convulse with laughter if you must – I did – but then consider that having the governing board on record for such an aspiration is at least a start, even though faculty conservatives remain scandalously scarce up there.

And next consider that if Professor Hart becomes Regent Hart, this academic heresy is over, kaput. Nanny McPhee is having none of it. “It is very unfortunate when intellectual diversity gets mixed up with political diversity,” she told a reporter. Translation: we’ll diversify our post-modernism between Foucault and Derrida, but no way we’re cohabiting this campus with limited-government reactionaries and pro-life primitives.

Will the professorial crowd or the populists prevail? Does San Fran Nancy fall to Ohio John Boehner, bookish Hickenlooper to biker Tancredo, urbane Bennet to bluejeans Buck, faculty-club Hart to gun-club Bosley? In ten days we’ll know.

Has GOP come undone?

(Denver Post, Oct. 10) “Not so fast,” warns the movie hero. He’ll make sure the cad or the con man doesn’t get away with it. One side in American politics has always been the party of “not so fast,” putting the brakes on expansive government power. Today that’s the Republican Party, and they serve the common good in doing it, even when unsuccessful. But I’m concerned that in the governor’s race this year, Colorado Republicans may be so unsuccessful that their restraining influence on political overreach is lost for a long time. Even the most fervent Democrats, if they remember the corruption of power, shouldn’t relish that prospect – though one can see why they’re keeping gleefully silent as Tom Tancredo and Dan Maes rip each other. Voting begins this week. The worry du jour last week was demotion of the GOP to minor-party status if Maes finishes under 10 percent. I don’t think he will, but he obviously won’t win either. In the likely outcome of Democrat John Hickenlooper winning, or the unlikely outcome of the freelancer Tancredo prevailing, the one certainty on Nov. 3 is a defeated, divided, and demoralized Republican establishment – which doesn’t augur well for constitutionalism.

What’s constitutionalism, and who cares? We all should. Our written constitution of self-government, in this state or the United States, is only as strong as the unwritten traditions of fair competition and civic virtue – habits of the heart, as they have been called – that sustain America as a caring community of free people. A jungle ethos of winning at any cost endangers all that. Let's not go there..

Too many on the right in Colorado, I’m sorry to say, already have. To be clear: While this party stalwart is firmly on record as supporting neither Maes nor Tancredo nor Hickenlooper, I have GOP friends in each man’s camp – and our friendship will survive the disagreement. The purpose here is to analyze attitudes, not to slam personalities. The slamming is what has to stop.

Reversing early assurances that he wouldn’t run an anti-Maes campaign, Tom has. On Dan’s side, a frothing anti-Tancredo screed is now online, slinging slurs like “chicken hawk.” It’s more bitter than a primary because there’s no intra-party comity to damp the invective. Tom says he’ll govern as a Republican if elected -- but it wasn’t long ago he emphatically disavowed the party label, and mocked Lincoln for good measure.

Political memories aren’t short. Even if Ken Buck wins, some congressional seats flip, and Democrats suffer legislative losses, a self-wounded GOP will be disadvantaged under the gold dome after this cannibalistic governor’s race. As tax pressures intensify and Obama girds for reelection, Colorado is going to need a party of “not so fast.” Who will it be? The American Constitution Party can’t mount a defense when liberals go on offense.

Whether Tancredo’s ambition succeeds this time, or fizzles as it did in the presidential primaries, many in my party will need to think long and hard about whether the end justifies the means. Maes’s undeniable weaknesses were but a relative excuse, not an absolute justification, for mass desertion of the Republican nominee. Somehow the McInnis disease, scorning party standard-bearers in 2006 and 2008, went epidemic in 2010.

Abandoning long-established institutions for “light and transient causes” violates conservative prudence, the Declaration of Independence warns. Many of the GOP’s finest, including four of Tom’s congressional colleagues, have gambled unconservatively this fall.

They used to say the Episcopal Church was the Republican regulars at prayer. The Tancredo movement seems like the regulars on a fling. Might all this, in hindsight, prove an overreaction? Have we destroyed the village to save it? “She’s come undone,” sang the Guess Who. I hope I’m wrong in applying that to our state’s Grand Old Party.

Wanted: Congressmen who listen

(Denver Post, Sept. 19) “It is essential to liberty,” wrote Madison in Federalist No. 52, “that the government should have a common interest with the people; an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with the people.” And what did he say is the only way to secure that? “Frequent elections, unquestionably.” We saw a perfect example of Madison’s point, and a beautiful thing it was, the other day when Sen. Michael Bennet and Reps. Betsy Markey and John Salazar, Democrats all, dived off the Obama bandwagon on his ill-conceived $50 billion Son of Stimulus plan to limit damage in the upcoming midterms. The president’s erstwhile congressional allies Colorado obviously see the plan as a source of damage. Even before the voters speak through their ballots in November, they’ve begun to murmur through townhalls and polls in September – and Markey, Salazar, and Bennet, big stimulus fans last year, are now all ears. “Immediate dependence on the people” strikes again. The system works (sort of).

We’d really know the system was working if Democratic Reps. Ed Perlmutter, Jared Polis, and Diana DeGette also expressed sudden distaste for the dangerous deficit and the obscenity of uncontrolled spending. It won’t happen with Polis and DeGette because they’re comfy in safe districts, cruising (they believe) toward another term. It still might happen with Perlmutter, who is polling dead even with GOP challenger Ryan Frazier; but as yet the suburbanite must feel less threatened by the Republican tide than his rural colleagues Markey out east and Salazar out west.

I’m acquainted with some libertarians and curmudgeons (often the same thing) who growl, “Don’t vote, it only encourages the SOB’s.” The present case refutes that attitude. Were it not for Cory Gardner running to oust Betsy Markey, Scott Tipton surging in his rematch with John Salazar, and Ken Buck putting the fear in Michael Bennet, with millions of voters at the ready, the Dems could continue supporting Obama’s leftist agenda to their hearts’ content.

Seems to me that more voting, not less, is what the doctor ordered for America right now. From Brown in Massachusetts to O’Donnell in Delaware, each week’s by-elections and primaries in 2010 have brought proof that we the people are wide awake, marshalling our votes to either make senators and representatives listen or replace them with unknown upstarts who will.

Thus the “emergency situation” for Diana DeGette this fall might turn out to be not a judge’s ban on tax dollars for destroying human embryos, about which she was fulminating on Tuesday, but an ER doctor’s candidacy to ban her and help repeal Obamacare. Is Republican Mike Fallon a longshot in Democratic Denver? Yes. Is DeGette a lock? No – not in this year of the Tea Party and Beck’s half-million on the Mall.

Election night won’t just see a massive wipeout of vulnerable House Democrats, predicts Karl Rove. It will also bring the upset of several congressmen whom no one thought vulnerable at all. Even Boulder’s Jared Polis, the epitome of urban cool and made of money, may not be out of reach for veteran, businessman, and family man Stephen Bailey, the GOP nominee in CD-2. Our won’t-listen Congress has stirred an anything’s-possible backlash.

The CD-7 seat that Perlmutter holds was expressly drawn for him by a friendly judge when Ed and I were state senators in 2002. How ironic if Frazier were to sweep him out of it now, just when demographics were supposed to be making the district loss-proof.

Which reminds me, Colorado has a won’t-listen Democratic legislature that may likewise go Republican in one or both houses on Nov. 2. My party is bent on that, with Hickenlooper leading for governor and redistricting coming up. As Madison also knew, maps matter mightily.

Eat healthy this election

(Denver Post, Sept. 5) “McInnis: A Jobs Governor,” say the bus benches and billboards that were to give the former GOP congressman a lift toward November after he won in August; only he lost. Still you see the slogan everywhere, as sad as a Christmas tree in spring, a reminder of how strange politics can be. Meanwhile the finalists for senator forge into fall with their own bizarre blemishes left over from summer – Democrat Michael Bennet alleged to have been a corporate looter, Republican Ken Buck scolded for joking that “I don’t wear high heels.” Has declining to cross-dress ever before been deemed politically insensitive? If such malefactors at the top of both tickets weren’t enough to make nonvoters of us all, my fellow Republicans have the opportunity to lose sleep over the shockingly moderate coloration of Tambor Williams, Maes’ designee for lieutenant governor. Becoming Light Guv is usually a disappearance sufficient to one’s face on a milk carton. But suddenly Ms. Williams, unlikely ever to take office and powerless if she did, was held up as my party’s bogeywoman of the center, sinister as Hillary Clinton. Come on.

Overall, it’s painfully evident that in 2010, even more than in most election years, few of us are going to get what we want. But can we at least get, as the self-help guru Mick Jagger once promised, what we need? I think so.

Suppose the campaign was a supermarket. You could breeze in for a Lotto ticket, a six-pack, and a gossip magazine – resulting tomorrow in the lottery not paying off, a hangover, and Brangelina as remote as before. This is the dreamy wish-fulfillment approach to elections that too many Americans, left and right, indulge in. Embarrassingly juvenile, really.

As grownups, though, you and I know better. We’re going to the store with a list, smart shoppers ready to turn last week’s earnings into next week’s eating. We’ll go easy on the junk food, heavy on the healthy stuff, and if the menu in coming days isn’t quite the banquet of our dreams, at least we’ve kept our self-reliance and our self-respect. We’re not chumps for anyone’s ad pitch.

Election Day will bring less frustration and more satisfaction (apologies to the Rolling Stones again), no matter where you’re located on the political spectrum, if you use Labor Day to make up your campaign shopping list in this fashion. The eight intervening weeks will also be less of an ordeal, because you’ll have a calm, cool sense of seeing through all the flimflam.

The aisles to avoid are the ones with entitlements, benefit goodies, borrowing from our kids, laws that play favorites, victimhood, appeasing aggressor, inflammatory wedge issues, hero-worship of my guys, demonizing the other guys, future scenarios with utopian fantasies or dystopian horrors. That stuff is junk no matter which party peddles it, and both sometimes do. It will only make a sick body politic sicker. Don’t even feed it to your dog.

Seeing through the flimflam isn’t the same as preventing it, of course. Some candidates and ballot issues perpetrating the above will win. Some opposed to it will lose. But your shopping list is good into 2011 and beyond, as a guide for holding all those darned politicians accountable. Do it!

And if your list includes the healthy restraints of divided government in Denver as well as Washington; the rebirth of competing media voices in our state; some soul-searching by Colorado Republicans and Democrats alike, after a sloppy show this year; a state Supreme Court chastened by voter vigilance; and a return to reality-based politics following the Obama euphoria of 2008 – well then, I can practically guarantee you a delicious, nutritious midnight supper on Nov. 2.

This Republican is staying

(Denver Post, Aug. 15) “I don’t know what the future holds,” my biblically-minded friends will say, “but I know Who holds the future.” Thus grounded, they’re able to be calm, courageous, confident, and cheerful in the face of adversity. Amidst a Republican base disheartened over the struggle to pick our nominee for governor, I am of good courage for a similar reason – political rather than theological. Even though I don’t know who will stand for my party this fall, I know what my party stands for. So division or defeatism is not an option for me over the next 11 weeks. Former state Sen. Cliff Dodge resigning as president of the Arapahoe Republican Men’s Club in order to join Tom Tancredo’s third-party bid, the morning after primary voters nominated Dan Maes, wasn’t quite Robert E. Lee choosing gray over blue – but it dramatized the deep fracture in GOP ranks. The kind of year we’re having, Maes and Tancredo may both be out of the race by the time you read this; no matter.

Each is a good man, neither is the next Lincoln, and the point here is bigger than either of them. Simply put, our state needs a unified Republican party to anchor the center-right. Sustaining the vitality and viability of this “grand old” institution of self-government in Colorado, 150 years and counting, is more important than winning any one election for any one office. Far more.

Shattering the state’s only vehicle for conservative governance in a petty power struggle, a summer fit of petulance, pique, and panic – and handing a plurality win to liberal John Hickenlooper as liberal Bill Ritter’s successor, at a time when liberalism is ever more discredited – would be an act of self-destructive folly with few parallels in modern history. My fellow Republicans shouldn’t do it, though many are tempted.

Not me, because I know what my party stands for. To say this is to assert two things. One is about principles. Republicans stand for individual liberty, personal responsibility, economic freedom, limited government, strong defense, traditional morality, recognition of human imperfectibility, and the understanding of rights as God-given, not manmade.

The other assertion is about process. My party stands (as in fact do our opponents, the Democrats) for the proven superiority of two well-established and diversified competitors vying for the consent of the governed, in preference to three or 23 splintered rivals, evanescent and narrow in the European style. Breakaway factions have occasional value if driven by issues; but the current Chicken Little outcry of “not electable,” opportunistically roosting on the Constitution ticket, hardly qualifies.

I voted for rookie-of-the-year Dan Maes in the primary. Barring the unforeseen, you can expect I’ll be for him again in November. He may not win; but nobody expected him to get this far. As noted here on August 1, Maes for Governor 2010 has echoes of Andrews for Governor 1990, another darkhorse nominee. Though I lost that year, the GOP began a decade and a half of dominance – which never could have occurred if someone like, say, Ted Strickland had gone third-party against me and toppled the temple.

Conservatives conserve. We’re the sensible ant to the liberals’ impulsive grasshopper. We don’t eat the seed corn. We don’t burn the house down for firewood. We don’t trash time-tested institutions for transitory whims, as too many Colorado Republicans now seem inclined to do. Think twice, compadres. Stop before it’s too late. Wake up.

Conservatives know, as Thomas Ferril’s poem in the Capitol rotunda has it, that “today is going to be long, long ago.” A single executive term is nothing – a robust and durable two-party system in this state, everything by comparison. Gov. Hickenlooper or no, my Republican devotion is immovable. My faith in Colorado self-government, unsinkable.