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.

Pro-union McClellan wrong for Arapahoe

The blunder of the decade in Colorado government was Bill Ritter’s edict to unionize all state employees. Why on earth would his fellow Democrat, Rebecca McClellan, consider the same idea for all county employees as she runs for Arapahoe County Commissioner? Maybe it has something to do with all the contributions she’s quietly taken from union organizations – some out of state – for several election cycles now. That, and McClellan’s glaring lack of business experience or business support. She simply has no context for understanding how to run a productive payroll or how to foster economic growth.

What a contrast with Mayor Nancy Sharpe – an experienced businesswoman, proven executive, and the only candidate talking about jobs. No wonder McClellan is full of phony indignation about Sharpe’s donations from developers. She has to distract voters from the unflattering matchup of pro-union liberal vs. pro-jobs conservative at a time when most of us in Arapahoe County are tired of the recession and looking for leaner government.

Mayor Sharpe has been endorsed by every member of the city council that serves with her – Democrats and Republicans alike. These are her colleagues who know her best, and they support her even across party lines. Four past county commissioners here in District 2 have also endorsed Nancy, as have the founders of the City of Centennial, the South Metro Denver Realtors Association, and the Home Builders Association.

That’s easy to understand, because her conservative credentials are strong. In the private sector, Sharpe oversaw multi-million dollar budgets and a hundred employees. As Mayor, she ELIMINATED ALL CITY DEBT, created a rainy day fund, and REDUCED SPENDING while maintaining service levels -- all without raising taxes. Few other elected leaders have comparable bragging rights these days.

McClellan, lacking much of a record and weak on the issues, has based her campaign on attacking Sharpe’s character and frightening the voters about transportation. That’s not credible because, after all, it was Nancy Sharpe who led the effort to secure $4 million for current improvements to I-25/Arapahoe to reduce congestion and help KEEP CARS OUT OF NEIGHBORHOODS. I’ve wasted too much time, as you probably have, in the slow crawl on Arapahoe Road, so it’s to see this work finally occurring.

Poor Rebecca is flailing. Her alarmist rhetoric, liberties with the truth, and melodramatic “emergency meetings” have community leaders shaking their heads. I’m concerned that her tactics could poison the whole issue and threaten any future improvements to the intersection – just around the corner from where I’ve lived since 1974.

That offends me, and it offends McClellan’s colleague in Centennial government, Mayor Pro Tem Ron Weidmann. “Don’t believe the personal attacks, misinformation, and mudslinging by Sharpe’s Democratic opponent about the redevelopment of I-25 and Arapahoe,” he warns. “It’s all created as a political tool to further her career.”

Jim Dyer, who is retiring as commissioner in District 2, told me that based on his firsthand knowledge of both contenders, “Nancy Sharpe is the candidate you can trust to bring real solutions and not play politics with the facts. She’s the one who secured those millions from T-REX for widening the Arapahoe interchange.”

So we have one candidate who brings real solutions and the other who simply cries wolf. In the faceoff between Sharpe the conciliator, conservative and pro-jobs, and McClellan the divisive pro-union liberal, I choose Steady Nancy.

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.

Jerry Brown slurs Whitman -- earns NOW's endorsement

The timing couldn't be more profound: just one day after California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown is caught on tape as a campaign aide calls Meg Whitman a "whore", the National Organization for Women announces -- you guessed it -- that it is supporting Jerry Brown for Governor. Proving that liberal orthodoxy trumps gender every time, NOW not only is endorsing a man over a woman in California, but it is apparently not concerned with Brown's acceptance of sexist, demeaning language being used against his opponent. In NOW's view, Whitman -- who is pro-life -- apparently doesn't warrant the kind of protection from mysogynist attacks that the group's charter is supposed to provide all women. But as it has proven time and time again, female conservatives are the wrong kind of women. Not that NOW can't be enraged by a politician's words -- just not those of Democrat politicians. Posted prominently on the NOW website, the group is vehemently denouncing Senator Jim DeMint's "dangerous comments" on gays and sexually active single women "being unfit to teach". According to NOW, DeMint's comments to a "conservative church group" make him a "sexist bigot" who is "ignorant, homophobic" and unfit to serve in the U.S. Congress. DeMint actually made these comments six years ago, and was only recently reflecting on the impact they had in the media in a speech he gave last week to the Greater Freedom Rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And he actually said that "gays and unmarried pregnant women" should not be public school teachers -- a statement that NOW extrapolated to mean "sexually active single women" -- as if every sexually active single woman gets pregnant. Leaving aside the wisdom of DeMint's views on these issues, is putting forward a value statement on public education really worse than calling a woman a "whore"?

For NOW -- which has never met a conservative woman it can support, a man who uses a sexist slur is still better than a self-made woman who embodies the very feminist values of hard work and female mobility that the group is supposed to stand for.

Shameful.

Life is never disposable

What sadness to learn that a Philippine woman gave birth to a baby on a flight from the Middle East and then left him in the trash on the plane. How could a mother do this? But wait! She said she was raped by her employer. Is it now OK to return the baby to the trash and let him die? Yet, isn't this the "choice" of those who advocate abortion? Their position is that it is cruel to force a woman to have a baby resulting from rape or incest.

When is the punishment of one person imposed on another person? Why is a baby in the womb killed because of someone else's sin of rape or incest? If the Filipino woman would have had an abortion before the flight, there would have been no story of a thrown-away baby.

Isn’t the real tragedy that our society approves of abortion while disapproves of babies in the trash? Vote for Amendment 62 as the baby in the womb is a person and not property to be disposed.