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.

Public broadcasting & me

My amicable collaboration with noncommercial radio in Colorado since the 1980s, and with noncommercial television since the 1990s (in the form of Head On, familiar to readers of this site and to viewers statewide), didn't get in the way of someone on the left named Joe Power whose story line of my alleged "hatred" for public broadcasting was peddled in a Nov. 14 letter to the Denver Post. The paper won't print my replies to such attacks in the form of a return letter; they want me to use my twice-monthly column for that purpose, which I don't regard as a good use of ink and paper. But I did post the following reply online: Mr. Power is howling at the moon with his indictment of my supposed antipathy to public broadcasting. If he checked his facts, it would emerge that my cordial relationship with both KCFR and KUVO, on the radio side, dates from the 1980s, and my TV presence on KBDI has been continuous since 1997, involving daily appearances on air as well as substantial underwriting donations, year after year.

I do agree with Congressman Doug Lamborn and millions of other Americans that NPR should not have a tax subsidy for its trendy leftist message, but that hardly makes me a "hater" of the non-commercial airwaves.

As to whether KVOD lives on since Gene Amole's demise, nope. The mere parroting of those call letters by Colorado Public Radio can no more revive the glories of old Ruby Hill than the word-games of "Invesco Field at Mile High" can resurrect the gone-forever grandstands of Mile High Stadium -- pulled down for a parking lot.

Hey GOP: Stand your ground

By Tom Tancredo Editor: We at Backbone America have had our concerns about whether former Rep. Tom Tancredo should have jumped in the recent Colorado gubernatorial race, and about how he then campaigned, and about his uncertain return to the Republican Party. But if such displays of backbone as this column are result of his stance (for now) as a friendly outsider to the GOP, we can only applaud. The piece first appeared on WorldNetDaily.com, Nov. 13, under the title, "Bipartisan games or downsizing government?" Well said, Tom!

Bipartisanship is greatly overrated as a formula for good government. Every major government boondoggle in recent memory was launched with bipartisan enthusiasm. Bipartisanship has its role in the day-to-day affairs of government. What separates genuine bipartisanship from bogus bipartisanship is one thing: honesty.

In Congress or any state legislature, it is normal for hundreds of bills to be passed with bipartisan support because much of government consists of making adjustments or improvements in ongoing programs that have broad public support. When dealing with the core functions of government, we seldom see sharp divisions along party lines.

But what we see today is a different thing. Bipartisanship is being urged on Republicans not as a "let's split the difference" compromise for a specific bill but as a principle for shaping the very definition of the problem to be solved. For example, if Republicans agree that the problem to be solved in a budget crisis is a "shortfall in revenues," then the compromise solution will inevitably be some level of tax increases to make up the "shortfall." This then becomes a debate over how to finance the growth of government, not how to reduce the size of government.

The Republican Party won victories in congressional and state races by promising to roll back Obamacare and other expansions of government. If they now squander those victories by abandoning the small-government agenda, they will deserve the scorn and ridicule of not only tea-party activists but concerned citizens everywhere.

In Colorado, the state now has a liberal Democratic governor-elect, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and a split legislature. Republicans are in the majority in the House and Democrats control the Senate. In this situation, neither party can control the legislative agenda. The question conservatives in Colorado are asking is: Will the legislative agenda become truly "bipartisan," or will Republicans be maneuvered into debating the details of compromises on the Democratic agenda?

To have a chance at genuine compromise and honest bipartisanship, Republicans must first have an agenda of their own. When leading Colorado Republicans like former Gov. Bill Owens join the Democratic governor-elect's transition team, that serves to give the Democrats' agenda a patina of "bipartisanship" at the outset. When the Democratic agenda is baptized a "bipartisan agenda" on Day 1, by not only the liberal media and interest groups but by a group of co-opted Republicans, legislators who don't buy into that agenda can be easily stigmatized as "partisan obstructionists."

Selling out your party's platform and policy agenda before the first shot is fired is a form of pre-emptive compromise that ought to be called by its right name: surrender. It is not bipartisanship in search of genuine solutions; it is gamesmanship in search of favorable press clippings. Such behavior may be acceptable to "party elders" who are accountable to no one, but it is not acceptable for elected representatives sent to the capitol to tackle tough problems and seek real solutions based on constitutional principles.

As other conservative leaders have observed, Big Government is on autopilot and programmed for a crash. Republicans need to find the off switch. Government needs a fundamental change in direction, not a spare fuel tank.

In Colorado, for example, Republicans in the state legislature would be smart to offer their own agenda as quickly as possible and not wait for the Democrats' "partnership" agenda, which will validate the status quo and seek "innovative" and "creative" (read: deceptive) ways to finance the continued growth of government. They could start with proposing a voucher system for public schools, adoption of the federal E-verify program for denying jobs to illegal aliens, a 10 percent across-the-board reduction in each state agency's budget except transportation, and phasing out state support for the state university system.

The clock is running out for the Republican Party. If they do not begin delivering on their promises, the grass-roots citizens' rebellion that swept them into office will find another vehicle for restoring constitutional liberties. In football terms, it is the middle of the fourth quarter, the score is Big Government 24, Small Government 3, and a field goal is not an acceptable play call.

Tom Tancredo (tgtancredo@gmail.com) is a former five-term congressman from Colorado, 2008 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and 2010 independent candidate for governor. He currently serves as chairman of the Rocky Mountain Foundation and co-chairman of TeamAmericaPac. Tancredo is the author of "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America's Border and Security."

Well done, voters!

The Republican congressional landslide resulted from a "failure to communicate empathy," not a rejection of Obama's policies, says Susan Barnes-Gelt in the November round of Head On TV debates. Okay, says John Andrews, if this shellacking was an empathy deficit, Katrina was a light breeze. John on the right, Susan on the left, also go at it this month over Colorado election results in state and federal races, the media's role in 2010 campaigns, and the wide-open contest for Mayor of Denver as Hickenlooper moves up. Head On has been a daily feature on Colorado Public Television since 1997. Here are all five scripts for November: 1. OBAMA’S NEW REALITY

Susan: The victorious Republican party appears to be tone deaf. Interpreting election results as repudiation of Obama’s policy, is nuts. Results reflect anger and fear about jobs, Wall Street and the failure of Obama’s team to communicate empathy outside the beltway. Despite the numbers, R’s are off to a bad start.

John: The President’s electoral shellacking – as he called it – was no more an empathy deficit than Katrina was an afternoon breeze. The American people fired Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats in record numbers because they don’t like reckless spending, higher taxes, huge deficits, and Obamacare. Republicans are on probation, but we’re back.

Susan: Interesting, because the American people don't feel like they're back. Unless you count the top 2 percent of the richest -tax cuts for millionaire/billionaires is not economic stimulus, creates no jobs, builds no public infrastructure. As Warren Buffet says, "guys like me can afford it."

John: Democrats with unchecked power in Washington the past two years put America on track to become a fiscal train wreck like Greece. The Republican House by itself can’t reverse that, but they can moderate Obama’s drunken spending and resist his job-killing war on free enterprise. Well done, voters!

2. COLORADO ELECTION RESULTS - FEDERAL

Susan: The US Senate race was Ken Buck’s to lose – and he did! Bennet won by a close margin because Buck pandered to the wing-nuts and tea partiers. Perlmutter won his race by a substantial margin because he worked hard. Markey and Salazar were tea party casualties.

John: Colorado’s House delegation, now 4-3 Republican, will defend our liberty and prosperity by standing against European-style socialism. Cory Gardner on the eastern plains and Scott Tipton on the western slope will represent us well. Michael Bennet, Obama’s puppet in the Senate, beat Ken Buck with the politics of personal destruction.

Susan: Puleeze. It's that kind of thinking that led to the decline of the Roman and British empires. The notion that private interest trumps public benefit is irrelevant in the face of diminishing global resources. Partisan bickering isn't the solution.

John: The fall of Rome occurred when a virtuous republic of self-reliant freemen and citizen soldiers became a decadent despotism that deified its leaders and quit defending its borders. Americans took a step back from that slippery slope on election day. What you call partisan bickering, I call democracy – thank goodness!

3. COLORADO ELECTION RESULTS - STATE

Susan: Hickenlooper won because your party self-destructed. Down ticket candidates Kennedy and Buescher lost because voters are cranky about the status quo. Hick will have an easier time with a divided legislature. His command of the bully pulpit is superb, though he’ll have to grow a thick skin.

John: For six years Democrats dominated the gold dome. Now divided government returns, and for the public interest that’s good. Congratulations to GOP House Speaker Frank McNulty, Treasurer Walker Stapleton, and Secretary of State Scott Gessler. And to Teflon John Hickenlooper, the first Denver mayor to become governor since the 1880s.

Susan: Hick is more than non-partisan. He's a-partisan. His ability to get along with everyone, in the interest of solving problems for Coloradans will set the bar. If hyper-partisans can't rise to the challenge, voters will boot 'em. Stapleton and Gessler will disappoint - big time.

John: Hickenlooper is lucky as much as anything. First the incumbent governor washed out. Then his three Republican opponents stumbled over each other like Curly, Moe, and Larry. Teflon John now faces a huge job to clean up the budget and revive the economy. I think you’ll see he’s all too human.

4. OPEN RACE FOR DENVER MAYOR

John: Hickenlooper will be the first governor in a century elected from the Denver mayor’s office. Voters could do themselves a favor by replacing him with the first mayor in half a century elected from the Republican side. The city is overtaxed, unsafe, and losing jobs. Denver needs a Rudy Giuliani.

Susan: John, you know Denver political offices are non-partisan. That’s why it works. Taxes and fees in Denver are the lowest in the metro area, because the city has the largest commercial districts. Denver’s next mayor must have a clear vision, a thick skin and an iron backbone.

John: I’m a suburban guy, but Denver’s vitality is important to all Coloradans. Economic and cultural leadership moving from the core city to the outer ring isn’t good. So who do you like for mayor, Susan – Chris Romer, Michael Hancock, James Mejia, Carol Boigon? Maybe you should run.

Susan: I'd love to run- articulate a bold vision, set clear priorities, inspire people to be the best they can be. Truth is, the only thing holding me back is finding someone more focused, ambitious and disciplined than I, to serve.

5. HOW WELL DID THE MEDIA PERFORM IN THIS CAMPAIGN?

John: I’m glad the political ads are finally off the air, but I sure love our free press. In Russia or Venezuela, critics of the regime are muzzled or murdered. In America, the Supreme Court protects their freedom of speech, and we the voters can throw the bums out. What a country, Susan,

Susan: The bigger problem is who pays for political ads – independent, anonymous committees spent $30 million+ in Colorado. Special interests owned the debate – on both sides of the aisle, to no one’s benefit. Lack of disclosure and transparency do one thing that’s bad for D’s and R’s –abet voter cynicism!

John: There was no cynicism in this year of the Tea Party. This was a free society and representative government at its best. New media helped empower political outsiders as never before. Thoughtful discussion in Colorado suffered with the absences of the Rocky Mountain News, but talk radio and TV did their part.

Susan: Thoughtful talk radio and Cable news - an oxymoron! Opinionators passing themselves off as journalists -whether it's Fox News or Keith Olbermann -does little to advance civic dialogue or critical thinking. Today's media (lame stream?) is looking for its soul.