Hey government, we're out of patience

(Denver Post, Jan. 9) “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.” The little poem from a century ago should haunt Colorado’s new governor and legislature as they climb the Capitol steps and set to work this week. John Hickenlooper is shrewdly adding Republicans as well as fellow Democrats to his cabinet, but no one has been appointed from the Tea Party. Speaker Frank McNulty, reclaiming a GOP majority for the first time since 2004, will preside over a House of 33 R’s, 32 D’s, and no T’s. Senate President Brandon Shaffer enjoys an opposite and more comfortable margin of 20 D’s, 15 R’s, and again, zero T’s. So what? This is our state’s two-party system in the same seesaw of power we’ve known since 1876 – politics as usual. But these are politically unusual times. The men and women who aren’t there under the gold dome in 2011, but whom our elected leaders can’t afford to ignore, are the Tea Party insurgents of the past two years.

Fewer than half of Colorado’s eligible voters turned out last November. The half that stayed home were not all Tea Partiers, of course. T’s came out in large numbers to help Republicans take the state House, unseat two Democrats from Congress, and support Tom Tancredo or Dan Maes for governor. Yet the fact remains that as campaigning now gives way to governing, T’s have no formal seat at the table. So it’s insiders beware.

The late Bill Buckley allowed LBJ only about a week in office before announcing in his magazine: “National Review’s patience with the Johnson administration is exhausted.” The Tea Party, a movement of hard-working Americans fed up with over-spending and over-government, is THAT impatient with politicians of both parties. You can imagine them sending Valentines such as these to the power-brokers at 200 E. Colfax:

“Dear Gov. Hickenlooper: No doubt you’re a good guy to have a beer with, though the motor scooter is a bit effete. But for now, forget the image stuff, park your presidential ambitions, and get the economy roaring again. Go after the unions and the spenders like you were Chris Christie. We’re dying out here. Love, Adams County.”

“Dear President Shaffer: What’s with you proposing to make it harder for us to change the state constitution? The constitution belongs to us, not to you and the other suits. Try reading it on opening day, the way Congress did. Then try again on fixing PERA, before it bankrupts the state. Respectful but steamed, Grand Junction.”

“Dear Speaker McNulty: You must have been quoted wrong about not repealing Ritter’s car tax, that outrageous affront to TABOR. When one of your members said the revenue is needed, you woodshedded him, right? Can a couple hundred of us come see you in the Old Supreme Court some afternoon? Patriotically, Pueblo.”

“Dear Senate Minority Leader Mike Kopp: Please fire up your caucus to fight harder than last year against the Obama transformation agenda on things like energy and health care. The GOP is Colorado’s best hope of not turning into California or Greece, but if you don’t show us more, a bunch of us are outta here. Worried in Widefield.”

“Dear House Minority Leader Sal Pace: Ouch, a few dozen votes in the Ramirez race and you could have been Speaker. For 2012, instead of lurching left with labor, why not become a fiscal hawk, a Dick Lamm-style Democrat? We can be had. Available in Arvada.”

Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. So said Reagan 30 years ago this month, and the Tea Party believes it is even truer today. If Colorado’s bipartisan establishment doesn’t pay heed, it will pay dearly.

Andrews' Christmas Carol

(Denver Post, Dec. 25) Senator John was a political man, a driven man, some would say a hard man. At dusk on Christmas Eve, he squinted from his office window through falling snow toward the Capitol, and grumbled to his assistant about the latest Bill Ritter gimmick: low-energy holiday lights. His clock struck five. “I suppose you’ll want all day tomorrow,” the aging conservative barked. “If you please, sir,” Joyce whimpered. “It’s only one day a year.” Back came the senatorial snort: “One day less for this office to defend faith, family, and the flag, while you fritter at home with your relatives and pastor. All right, but you’ll owe me an extra Reagan catechism on Monday.” Hurrying past a shopping-cart woman on the corner, Andrews got in his gas-guzzler to head home. Driving south, his thoughts turned northward, not to Santa’s workshop but to the ANWR oil reserve. He ejected his wife’s “Messiah” CD, popped in the latest Cato Institute lecture, and speed-dialed Douglas Bruce.

Then it happened. Distracted by an Obama bumper sticker, the grouchy Republican braked too late for a red light and skidded into a fire hydrant, triggering both a geyser and his airbag. That was the last thing John remembered; everything went black.

A gray-haired lady was shaking him. He sniffed the musty air of Buena Vista’s old elementary school. “You’re not…?” Dorothy Roman smiled. “Yes, I am: your teacher from 1957. For a smart boy, you’re often still a dunce. Follow me.”

Stopping at several homes, she showed him classmates he’d looked down on. Peeking into a church, he saw two brothers ridiculing a less affluent family’s Christmas attire. “Ouch,” he murmured, “Jim and me.” Then to the Andrews ranch, where his mother sat by the fire in tears. “People matter most, John,” Mrs. Roman said quietly. “You’ve often written that, but do you live it?”

“Dad, are you okay?” From the darkness, the dazed rightwinger heard his policeman son shouting through the shattered windshield. But an instant later it was blazing daylight, Christmas morning, and he was 500 feet above downtown in Jeff Puckett’s “Prayer One” helicopter. “Joy to the world, the Savior is born,” crackled the pilot’s voice over the intercom.

Fellow passengers began identifying landmarks. Ron McKinney, a Salvation Army captain, gestured to Red Shield Community Center in a gang neighborhood. Kent Hutcheson pointed out school after school where Colorado UpLift staffers mentor inner-city kids. Bob Cote waved up at them from the Step Thirteen shelter and rehab facility.

Far below, a beaming teenager with a new basketball emerged from a boarded-up house. “Look, Pops, it’s one of the families our company adopted through Denver Kids Inc.,” said John’s daughter over the intercom. He tried not to think about his new landscaping at home. Rev. Tom Melton, who coordinates the weekly prayer flights, greeted them upon landing, serious for once. “Remember, Senator, we’re all one city.”

Flashers from an emergency vehicle blasted his eyeballs. The Cato lecturer was droning on about Ayn Rand. John blacked out, then seemed to waken amid the smell of sanitary chemicals and body fluids. A gaudy banner proclaimed this was Sunrise Assisted Living and it was New Year’s 2030. What was so familiar about the bent man dozing in front of the TV?

“Patty Gordon, who left us back in 2007, was always so warm and kind,” a nurse was saying. “So was her daughter Donna, John’s wife. But with old Mr. Brainy, it was always books and ideas, votes and visions. Now look at him. Too bad.”

The horrified columnist screamed and woke, himself again at last. Paramedics jumped back as he leaped from the wreckage, shouting: “Holy Scrooge, a second chance! Goodwill toward men and no excuses. I’ll try harder, God help me. Merry Christmas, everyone.”

Election transparency overdue

(Denver Post, Dec. 5) What is CoDA? If you said a rock group, a wonder drug, or a state agency, you’re wrong. It’s the Colorado Democracy Alliance, today’s smartphone successor to the old dialup state Democratic Party. CoDA’s coup in turning Colorado blue is related in this year’s most important political book, “The Blueprint,” by Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer. What is infrastructure? If you said the streets and sewers in our cities, or the shovel-ready projects in Obama’s imagination, wrong again. It’s the stealthy political network of message groups, ethics watchdogs, litigators, voter registration cadres, and money conduits that the left wins with while the right eats their dust. Ken Buck and Tom Tancredo have said infrastructure was one reason they lost. What reduced Scott McInnis from favorite to fiasco overnight? If you said investigative journalism, or Maes’s magic, or Scott’s own bumbling, nope. Infrastructure operatives dug up the McInnis plagiarism story, then CoDA groups spent $500,000 on TV ads alerting Republican voters. Maes nominated, Tancredo in play, Hick in control, game over.

All of this is quite legal. But Schrager, a 9News reporter, and Witwer, a former GOP legislator, explain in their book that CoDA hoped to remain a secret forever. A leak from whistle-blower Isaac Smith, a young idealist who was “fed up with both parties,” in his words, ended the secrecy in 2008. Yet too many in my party are still sidetracked on vetting fantasies or RINO name-calling, when they ought to be memorizing “The Blueprint” and organizing to fight back.

CoDA’s godfathers include billionaire Tim Gill, who boasted to The Atlantic in 2007, “They won’t know what hit them,” and propagandist Michael Huttner, who correctly predicted to Schrager and Witwer that “Colorado’s progressive infrastructure will work as a buttress” to limit the damage here in 2010, regardless of Dem losses elsewhere. They still want a low profile for their brainchild; Huttner wouldn’t comment for this story.

Yet much as we’re soothingly told, Oz-fashion, to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” there are two important reasons why everyone in Colorado should gain a working knowledge of the CoDA infrastructure and the new electoral landscape. Both are American as apple pie, nonpartisan as Li’l Abner: a fair fight and good government.

Unless conservatives climb back to parity with liberals’ sophisticated machinery, in this era when campaign laws have neutered the old party organizations, we’ll keep losing the biggest races to candidates like Michael Bennett and John Hickenlooper who care little for limited government or free markets. We’ll see GOP newcomers like Congressman Cory Gardner and Treasurer Walker Stapleton beleaguered with infrastructure attacks from their first day in office. Not fair.

And unless all of us as citizens, left, right, and center, equip ourselves with honest awareness of who is doing what to whom, we’ll be left with that uneasy feeling of suckers at a carnival shell game. When Democratic dollars tip Republican primaries for Maes in Colorado and Sharon Angle in Nevada, it smells corrupt, even if legal. Not good.

Such manipulation ultimately endangers America. As former Gov. Dick Lamm, himself a Democrat, wrote in recommending the Schrager-Witwer book, CoDA presages a brave new world “where winning is everything and there is no moral bottom line.” Do we want that?

“It was unethical at best,” Isaac Smith says of the CoDA scheming he stumbled upon as a Bighorn Center intern. “And so hypocritical,” he adds, what with his employers’ sanctimonious advocacy of Amendment 41 and the talk of getting big money out of politics. Out of sight, maybe; but hardly out.

You hear about government transparency, where spending is in plain sight. Shouldn’t we also have election transparency and open politics? Read “The Blueprint” over the coming holidays. It will wise you up for the razzle-dazzle of 2011.

Lucky, deserving, or blessed?

(Denver Post, Nov. 21) America has a memory problem. Most of us couldn’t tell you who our great-grandparents were. Most people who live in Denver, Parker, Thornton, or Greeley couldn’t tell you who their hometown was named after.Most of us couldn’t possibly remember who the days of the week were named for either. And as the years pass, it seems that fewer and fewer Americans remember who we’re supposed to be thanking on Thanksgiving Day.

School’s out all week on our campus, and the students will like that. Thanks, professor. Harvest bounty will flow from the farms through the kitchens and onto festive tables. Thanks, Mom – or thanks, Dad, if it’s a restaurant party. Sports and entertainment will have a big weekend starting Thursday, retailers a really big one starting Friday. Thanks, consumers. Airports will be even more hectic than usual. Thanks for nothing, TSA.

But if we skate along to the following Monday with no more reverence or reflection than that, we’d better stop and ask ourselves the Peggy Lee question: Is that all there is? Tom Noel, romping through history with his column a week ago about Denver’s first Thanksgiving in 1859, mentioned the territorial governor’s proclamation for “appropriate observance of the day.” What did Gov. Samuel Medary mean?

Probably the same thing that President George Washington meant with his proclamations in the century before, and Gov. William Bradford with his in the century before that. The same thing President Lincoln would mean a few years later in summoning Americans for “a day of praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” And the same that Colorado’s founders would mean in placing upon the state seal “Nil Sine Numine,” nothing without God’s spirit, a few years later still.

Whether they know it or not, legislators gathering to represent us at the State Capitol have those words in their hand every time they grasp the ornate brass doorknobs, and behind their heart every time they sit in the official chairs. The seal is everywhere under the gold dome; earlier generations took its symbolism that seriously.

Our generation is more coolly detached about these things. We know better, or think we do. The detachment may come at a price, however. Whether it’s Congress and the General Assembly grappling with deficits and entitlements, educators perplexed over test scores, law enforcement nervous about jihadists, parents suspicious of pot, or all of us battling the recession, the reverential mindset has resources that the on-our-own mindset lacks.

A society where people believe that good things come their way as a result of being lucky or deserving is more vulnerable to hubris and overreach in easy times, discouragement and dissension in hard times. A society where people interpret life’s ups and downs in the context of blessings or lessons from some sort of purposeful higher Providence is going to have the advantage in steadiness, resiliency, and cohesion.

Pluralist Colorado has both kinds of people. The person next to you at dinner on Thursday may be of the opposite mindset from yours, and no harm done – you’ll still appreciate each other, still be grateful for each other and for the day. But grateful to whom? That’s the common vocabulary of faith we’re losing. That’s the frame of reference which is slipping further and further out of focus, for all our surface religiosity.

Thanksgiving is no longer the one day in 365 when a great majority of Americans rededicate ourselves as a nation under God, and we’re the poorer for it. There’s a perilous century ahead. Facing it as reverential stewards of “the blessings of liberty,” I like our chances. Swaggering ahead as a lucky land, exceptional and entitled, I’m not so sure.

Two cheers for the two parties

(Denver Post, Nov. 7) Chastened.

The one-word opening paragraph was a Denver trademark for the late, great Gene Amole, columnist for a paper that is no more, classical DJ for a station that is no more. You missed something special if you weren’t around when he was writing for the Rocky and broadcasting for KVOD. Old Gene would not have gotten too wound up about the raucuous 2010 campaign and the odd election that mercifully terminated it on Tuesday. Neither should we. In electing some honorable people to represent us, while leaving the big political parties chastened, we did a pretty good day’s work for self-government.

The improvement was incremental, but all durable improvements in a free society are. Americans know that in our bones. It’s one of the things that make us a conservative-leaning nation. We instinctively sense the advantages of divided government as a brake on official mischief. Hence the wave of ticket-splitting in Colorado last week.

The same voters who extended Democrats’ lease on the governor’s office and the US Senate seat, elevating John Hickenlooper and retaining Michael Bennet, crossed over to support Republican challengers for two congressional seats and two constitutional posts – favoring Cory Gardner over Betsy Markey, Scott Tipton over John Salazar, Walker Stapleton over Treasurer Cary Kennedy and Scott Gessler over Secretary of State Bernie Buescher.

Citizens wisely refuse to give more than two cheers for either the Republicans or the Democrats as a trustworthy political brand. Each has forfeited trust on too many occasions. The chastening effect upon both parties’ leadership is only an inference so far. But if they’re not doing some introspection after this tough election cycle, the denial is beyond incurable.

Dems had a governor, in Bill Ritter, so vulnerable they had to hustle him offstage. The GOP had two gubernatorial finalists, in Scott McInnis and Dan Maes, so flawed that a force of nature named Tom Tancredo swooshed into the vacuum. Speaker Terrance Carroll’s majority in Denver got a similar pink slip to that of Nancy Pelosi in Washington. Republicans put a weak appointed senator seemingly down for the count, but they couldn’t knock him out.

As the red and blue twin dinosaurs lumbered through their paces again this year, I think something encouraging began to happen in people’s attitude about the whole ritual. Too often, politics is like that king in the Book of Daniel who conditioned his subjects to kneel before the golden idol on a trumpet call. It’s a con game to distract us from self-reliance. A better politics happens when folks get up on their hind legs and take responsibility. And isn’t that what the Tea Party and the 912 groups are all about?

Within a month of Barack Obama’s inaugural address calling for “a new era of responsibility,” many people began to conclude that his transformative collectivist vision for America was actually the height of irresponsibility. Grassroots organizing took off, inspired by the patriots of 1773 and soaked with bipartisan skepticism for government insiders. Colorado’s cranky electorate with its mixed verdict on Nov. 2 is one result.

Personal responsibility is the price of individual liberty. Personal responsibility is the antithesis of paternalistic bureaucracy, paralytic regulation, PC thought control, and profligate fiscal follies. It underlies the “Send me” spirit of the Tea Party. The new political force preaching responsibility and repentance to both parties, envisaged in a series of columns here since mid-2007 (I called it Element R) is now upon us.

Obama’s policy indiscipline and blame habit have long since discredited his faux-responsible pose. Moving into 2011, Americans will insist on the real deal. The Republican-Democrat duopoly, resuming business with a plate-full of state and federal problems, is on notice from the responsibility movement to get serious. That, or face an even stiffer chastisement next time.