The Road to 2020

(Denver Post, Oct. 30) In a year and a week, we’ll know who Americans want for president. Anybody who claims much certainty about it until then is howling at the moon. I have no prescience about the race, other than to implore my fellow Republicans against over-confidence in the face of Obama’s potent incumbency and billion-dollar war chest. Unsure as I am about 2012, however, I’ve just been through an experience that encourages me for America’s prospects in this decade, the road to 2020. Strange as it sounds amid our economic woes and the dire predictions of decline, there are signs of a strong rebound like that of the 1980s soon to come.

What makes me say so? The impressions gathered on a book tour. Almost daily since August, when I brought out “Responsibility Reborn: A Citizen’s Guide to the Next American Century” from MT6 Media, they’ve had me talking about it across the country in radio interviews, TV appearances, and speeches. It’s like campaigning again, only the exchange of ideas is far richer.

And my take-away is that Middle America’s “remnant” – as the unbowed faithful were called in ancient Israel – has not yet begun to fight. The fiscal follies, the Great Recession, and the Occupy Wall Street tantrum haven’t deadened the core of character that makes us exceptional. The American spirit, though battered, remains resilient. A hundred days on the author circuit have convinced me.

Personal responsibility as the indispensable condition of freedom and the price of sustained success, a theme in my Denver Post column since 2007, is also the theme of my book. The responsibility deficit as causative to our budgetary and educational and national security deficits – and as fatal to our country, if things don’t change – is my uncheerful warning to every audience. What’s remarkable is that they get it.

The talk shows that have me on, the groups I’m speaking to, are mostly political and conservative, Republican, and in many cases Christian. If they bridled at being told the GOP is part of the responsibility deficit, an entitlement enabler, and that our urgent challenge now is more moral and cultural than partisan or political, I’d worry. But because they own up, instead of pushing back, I am heartened. Therein are the makings of a turnaround.

America has seen this movie before, remember. After the stormy 1960s gave way to the stagnant ‘70s, elite opinion clucked over the nation’s impending decline, the need for lowered expectations, the likelihood we’d seen our best days. Elections weren’t what refuted that. Rebirth of a responsibility ethic from the bottom up refuted it. Reagan’s rise was a consequence, not a cause.

This is why I’m bullish on USA 2020, regardless of the 2012 electoral outcome. Win or lose next year, Barack Obama is indisputably Jimmy Carter redux – and having to endure another term of the man, with an opposition Congress restraining his leftward lurch, won’t ruin us. Do I want that? No. Nor do I expect it. But my confidence rests outside politics, with the already-dawning return of Element R, the responsible remnant.

Politicians fade so fast. By the time we vote in 2020, whoever next wins the presidency will be done in Washington. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Denver Mayor Michael Hancock will be done in my state, as will most of today's big names in your state. Fixing on the 2020 horizon, and prioritizing a responsibility agenda that puts cultural renewal ahead of governmental goals, will best harness the Tea Party energy for lasting change.

On tour, I have talked of ten steps for this decade. The first five aren’t even political: families strengthened, learning honored, charities expanded, churches energized, multiculturalism outgrown. Upon that foundation we then aim for citizenship revived, defenses rebuilt, government relimited, sovereignty reasserted, freedom of conscience upheld. Personalities come and go. Principles endure. What are yours?

Democrats vs. democracy

(Denver Post, Sept. 25) Why are the Democrats so afraid of democracy? Do they worry that the will of the people won’t go their way? So it would seem. Several Colorado court cases illustrate the pattern. The Fenster suit to annul the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the Lobato suit to increase education spending, and the ACLU suit to block school choice in Douglas County, all ask unelected judges to substitute their wisdom for that of we the people. Dems are orchestrating each of them, token GOP support notwithstanding. Preferring litigation to legislation is not the only symptom of Democrats’ voter-phobia. The negative propaganda blitz is another. If you’re a liberal and you fear a conservative election wave, crank up the shrill charges and count on echoes from your media allies. Slime the opposition voters until they are delegitimized in public opinion and demoralized in their hearts.

America has never seen this tactic more desperately deployed than in the all-out attack on the Tea Party movement. Which makes sense from the left’s point of view, since the country has not experienced such a surge to the right since the rise of the conservative movement itself, 35 years ago under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Off balance, the Democrats reached for a stopper: race.

A nonpartisan responsibility backlash from the heartland against the bipartisan irresponsibility of Washington, a citizens’ outcry to stop us going off the cliff fiscally and constitutionally – that and nothing more – this phenomenal new force in national politics had to be branded with bigotry when status-quo defenders realized other smears (terrorists, extremists, nihilists, saboteurs) weren’t scary enough.

It started last year – unsuccessfully – and just recently we in the Tea Party had Congressional Black Caucus stalwarts Maxine Waters calling us intimidators who could go to hell and Andre Carson likening us to a KKK lynch mob, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson tagged segregationists in the 1950s as “a tea party” no different from today’s.

On what evidence? None. The sum total of racist incidents ever documented at Tea Party rallies is one jerk with the N-word on a sign in Houston in 2009. Denver saw a bigger and better sample this July, when I held the gavel as hundreds of Tea Party activists from 25 states gathered for the Western Conservative Summit – and a less racist group you could not find.

They gave the presidential straw poll victory to Herman Cain over a dozen white candidates. Listening to Cain, a black businessman, speak against the mess in Washington, the Summit delegates saw character, competence, and charisma – not color.

Meanwhile in Colorado Springs, a young entrepreneur transplanted from Chicago, Derrick Wilburn, has founded the Rocky Mountain Black Tea Party. Its mission, one learns at www.RMBTP.org, is “bringing together persons of color to educate, inform, and encourage true diversity of political thought and expression.”

The group’s well-attended monthly meetings prove that “black and conservative are not mutually exclusive,” says the cheerfully counter-cultural Wilburn. He’s a registered independent who was, like so many Tea Party activists, apolitical until Obama’s leftward lurch alarmed the bejesus out of him two years ago.

Democratic scare-mongers like Reps. Carson and Waters could journey to the foot of Pike’s Peak and learn that the R we care about as Tea Partiers isn’t race, or even Republicans as such. It’s renewed responsibility – restraint in spending and recovery in the economy, so the United States does not become Greece.

We want to use our votes to make sure the land of opportunity isn’t driven into decline while our least-fortunate fellow citizens remain trapped at the bottom. You’d think Democrats, minorities in particular, would want that too. But if it threatened the incumbents’ power and privilege, maybe not. Their party sure has trouble living up to its name.

Color us red in 2012?

(Denver Post, Aug. 28) I wish Tom Tancredo was Governor of Colorado. I wish Scott McInnis was. Heck, I wish the ill-starred Dan Maes was governor. Any Republican, any conservative, rather than the limousine liberal Democrat we’re stuck with, John Hickenlooper. Whence these idle fantasies? Not heat stroke from recent egg-frying temperatures. Not oxygen deprivation from my annual 14er climb. No, it started when I found myself seated between Tancredo and McInnis at a GOP luncheon on Aug. 10, the anniversary of Scott’s shocking loss to Maes in last year’s gubernatorial primary. Tancredo, you remember, was so sure neither man could beat Hickenlooper that he demanded both quit – then bolted and ran as the American Constitution Party nominee. The final numbers in a campaign most of us would like to forget were Hick 51%, Tank 37%, and Maes 11%. Ouch.

Someone said this luncheon was the first time Scott and Tom, formerly congressional colleagues, had seen each other since then. Nothing untoward occurred, and the occasion went in the file drawer of funny coincidences. But that awful August flashback got me wondering whether our party has learned enough from its debacle in 2010 to count on carrying Colorado in 2012.

My daydream of reclaiming the governorship isn’t on tap next year – perhaps just as well, since the GOP has lost five straight contests since 2004 for that seat and for U.S. Senate. So coloring the state a Republican red again in 14 months would mean winning the Colorado House and Senate, keeping or improving our 4-3 edge in congressional seats, and above all, delivering nine electoral votes against President Barack Obama.

Can the Grand Old Party do that? Part of the answer will depend on organizational and fundraising efforts by young state chairman Ryan Call, elected last winter after veteran chairman Dick Wadhams stood down.[1] Part will depend on conservatives and moderates (like the two dozen ex-legislators from both camps at the luncheon) transcending our differences to unify in defeating Democrats.

On those fronts, prospects seem good. On others, however, work is needed. After Call’s luncheon speech, Tancredo queried him about efforts on the right to match CoDA, the Colorado Democracy Alliance of nonprofit groups outside formal party ranks that has given the left such an advantage here in every cycle from 2004 to 2010. Nobody claims that one is solved yet.

A few days later, in a column for World Net Daily, Tancredo asked another tough but fair question: Do Republicans here and elsewhere really want to be “the party of constitutional liberty – or merely the ‘other’ party, the party of slower drift into socialism instead of the passionate embrace of socialism offered by the Obama Democrats”?

The Colorado House under GOP control this year, Tom went on to say, missed its opportunities for “connecting state Democrats to Obama’s policies” by offering a “coherent alternative” that would “reverse course” on such issues as health care, regulation, and taxes.

Speaker Frank McNulty, nursing a 33-32 majority, would doubtless disagree. But there’s a case to be made that voters will need to see more evidence of a rising red tide in policy under the Gold Dome next January if they are to move the state out of the blue column next November.

Then there’s the Tea Party. Dan Maes, hapless novice that he was, turned the best phrase of 2010 in pleading to “introduce the institution to the revolution” and thus cement a Colorado conservative majority. Wrong messenger, right message.

Maes told me last week he sees Chairman Call and other Republicans making progress on allying with this potent new force for freedom and responsibility. Will it work? “The jury is out,” said Dan. On such an alliance, more than any other factor, the red-state hopes for 2012 will turn.

[1] The column as published in the Denver Post erroneously stated that Call's candidacy "moved... Wadhams to retire." In fact, however, Wadhams dropped his bid for another term prior to Call's entering the chairman's race. I regret the misstatement.

Responsibility movement grows

(Denver Post, July 24) Will Barack Obama go the way of Jimmy Carter, and lose reelection after demonstrating weak leadership in a troubled economy? One Coloradan with a keen nose for the political wind signaled last week that he thinks it might happen. Gov. John Hickenlooper told a reporter the president would “have a hard time” carrying our state right now, because “there’s such dissatisfaction over people who have been out of work” for months or even years. Though Hick’s warning wasn’t an outright prediction of Obama’s defeat, it’s significant because Colorado is widely considered a must-win if he is to hold the White House. If voters throw out the incumbent, it will be as much because of conclusions we the people have reached about ourselves, as because of anything we conclude about the Democratic president and his Republican challenger, whoever that may be.

We’ll have realized that “consent of the governed” is a responsibility for each of us, not just a mass wave swept along by partisan currents and media gales. Again in 2012, as in 1980 when Carter was ousted, Americans will have decided it’s grab the steering wheel or crash. The leadership reversal we could see next year would simply be the culmination of a citizenship resurgence that began a year or two ago.

The Tea Party movement, consciously echoing the determined citizens who resisted royal oppression and later wrote consent into the Declaration of Independence, is the most potent force for reassertion of America’s founding principles since the Reaganauts of the 1970s refused to believe our best days were behind us. Its emergence in 2009 answered my hope, expressed in several 2007 columns, for a responsibility movement to challenge both parties and reach beyond them.

The conscience our self-government has long lacked is awake again at last. A GOP president taking office in 2013, if such occurs, would find himself or herself equally under the skeptical Tea Party eye as the GOP Congress does now. The new political mandate is to do the right thing; not the easy or customary thing, but the right thing and nothing less. What a welcome change, and just in time to save ourselves – if we still can.

Doing the right thing by choice, and then owning the consequences of your choice: that’s personal responsibility. There’s no other antidote to the debt candy and the entitlement addiction gripping Democrats and Republicans alike. No other antidote to the fiscal deficits engulfing state and federal budgets. No other antidote to the moral deficit of throwaway marriages, negligent parenting, rigged school tests, hacked cell phones.

Deficits abound, but it’s ultimately the responsibility deficit that will sink us unless we get a grip. Its symptoms are everywhere – in dishonest pension promises, in Orwellian day-care regulations, in sanctimonious politicians with zippers down, in an Obamacare law that embeds big business and big labor with big government, waivers the connected, dehumanizes the patient, cooks the books, and calls it reform.

The American experiment asks a brilliant, daring question: How much success can freedom produce? The answer, for the first two centuries, was an astounding amount. But the 1960s and ‘70s revealed a serpent in the garden. We learned that freedom and success can be their own worst enemies. Responsibility has to temper and guide them. History’s drama turns on our continually forgetting and relearning that.

It was responsibility reborn in citizens’ hearts and minds, not mere electoral victories, that turned twilight in America after Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations, and stagflation into morning in America with booming growth, renewed confidence, and Cold War victory.

Another responsibility movement seems to be stirring today. It didn’t start in Washington; they never do. The Washington crowd will either catch on or catch hell. Time is short. History’s drama heightens.

A lioness in the White House?

(Denver Post, June 26) “The best man in the cabinet.” That’s how Golda Meir was described by her colleague, David Ben-Gurion. She went on to lead Israel to victory in one of its darkest hours, the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Meir once attended Denver’s North High School, and you can visit her girlhood home in Auraria. The little grandmother was revered as “the Iron Lady,” before Britons conferred the title on Margaret Thatcher. The grocer’s daughter was not one to shrink from the sound of the guns either. She vanquished Argentina in the Falklands and helped stiffen George H. W. Bush’s spine (when they were together in Aspen, as it happened) after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I thought of the Iron Ladies, with their Colorado connections and their heroic leadership of America’s closest allies, last week after Michele Bachmann electified the first Republican presidential debate. Pundits were derisive, one scoffing that her rivalry with Sarah Palin is a "cat fight." Unfair? Yes. Surprising? No.

Palin and Bachmann know you don’t go on the playground unless you can take rough teasing, and both have survived worse. This latest round merely reminds us it’s a liberal man’s world in which conservative women are fair game for putdowns and the non-sexist PC rules apparently don’t apply.

It’s ironic, though -- because there’s evidence that each woman is no common kitty, but a lioness with mettle such as few American politicians of either sex have demonstrated in our times. While Bachmann and Palin can’t yet be compared with Thatcher or Meir, both are on a career arc that could lead there in a decade. What two other women, after all, have ever vied for a major party’s presidential nomination?

As for the evidence I’m referring to, Denver audiences wowed by the Minnesota congresswoman and the former Alaska governor could attest to their remarkable appeal. Colorado Christian University, where I work, brought in Michele Bachmann last summer and Sarah Palin this spring. Each lit up the room.

Bachmann roused a crowd of 600 at Western Conservative Summit 2010 with her fiery yet precise argument for returning Congress and the White House to Republican hands. Palin was equally impressive as she used a speech at CCU on May 2, the day after our forces killed Bin Laden, to spell out a statesmanlike doctrine for the use of U.S. military power.

After some banter about basketball and bear hunting, the alleged airhead from Wasilla (perpetually underestimated, like a certain B-movie actor who won 49 states and took down the USSR) deftly zinged Pakistan’s double-dealing and Obama’s “ill-defined” Libyan folly. Then with Reaganesque toughness she set forth five principles for the American way of war:

(1) “Commit our forces only when clear and vital American interests are at stake.”

(2) “If we have to fight, fight to win. Use overwhelming force. Defeat the enemy as quickly as possible. Nation-building is not the main purpose of our armed forces.”

(3) “Have clearly defined goals and objectives before sending in troops. If you can’t explain the mission to the American people clearly and concisely,” stay out.

(4) “American soldiers must never be put under foreign command.”

(5) “Sending our armed forces should be the last resort. We don’t go looking for dragons to slay.”

Neither of the Bushes, nor Clinton, nor Obama, ever put it so well. America’s day will come, as Britain’s and Israel’s did, to be led by a lioness. Not one but two are in view for 2012. Lady Liberty could do a lot worse than Bachmann or Palin.