A day for fools and Christians

Note: This was also the first column on Townhall.com, Sunday 4/1/07 (Andrews in Denver Post, April 1) As a staunch conservative, I’ve never had much use for Hillary and Bill. But after their recent civil rights pilgrimage to Selma, Alabama, a change of heart overtook me. I have signed on as national chairman of Republicans for Clinton 2008, and you read it here first.

Actually, you read it here on April First, which means I’m fooling. You weren’t really taken in, were you? It was just too far out of character. Of course, people thought the same thing when such bad actors as Saul of Tarsus, slave trader John Newton, and Nixon hatchet man Chuck Colson signed on as born-again Christians. They were dismissed as frauds, fools, or both. But each man’s turnabout made him a benefactor to society thereafter.

Since the nonsense of April Fool’s and the solemnity of Holy Week coincide this year, it’s worth asking what it might be, besides foolish superstition, that makes the churches overflow on Palm Sunday and Easter every spring. After two millennia of continued human suffering, following the arrival of a Prince of Peace who was supposed to change all that, why do believers still believe?

Paul, the former Saul, cheerfully confessed himself a fool for Christ, take it or leave it. He conceded that the cross, in which the faithful see salvation, may appear as just so much foolishness to nonbelievers. In other words, reasonable people can differ about these things – and God talk comes off poorly in newsprint anyway.

Sticking then to what is, shall we say, historically and sociologically verifiable, it’s a fact that the reason Christians take Holy Week so seriously is their individual and collective experience of finding that forgiveness and love are in the world more fully in our day because -- as they are convinced -- Jesus died and rose in Caesar’s day. The bunnies and colored eggs next Sunday are all very well, so is the foolery this Sunday, but the bottom line is this love thing.

Granted, those of us who claim to be Christ’s followers have a woefully uneven record of living this out. We profess to worship a good man, executed unjustly, who used his dying breaths to redeem a fellow convict, give his grieving mother a new son, and even forgive his murderers. Why do we often dishonor his example by bashing each other with Bibles?

And that’s among ourselves. Christians’ too-common coldness to those outside the fold is another embarrassment. The hardest thing about Jesus for me to imitate is the unconditional love that he’s said to give absolutely everyone. Ouch. The political opponents my column sometimes harshly condemns? He’s fine with them. Marxists and Islamofascists? He cherishes each one personally, err as they may. I am shamed by his gentle patience with each atheist, his tender heart toward each illegal alien.

The Founder of my faith is so far ahead of me in the forgiveness department that I blush to write this. He was harder on religious hypocrites than government hacks, tougher on temple profiteers than drunken prostitutes. Who knew? If we who claim to be his church don’t find ourselves startled and chastened by him every single day, we’d best wake up.

Two good friends of mine (good Christians also, as it happens) share an April 1 birthday. Imagine turning a year older with your high school sweetheart on each Day of Fools, and making a marriage work all the way to grandparenthood. Maybe it's helped them keep the sense of humility – and absurdity – that gets a couple through the rough spots. Personally, on those mornings when I see a dunce in the mirror, I’m a bit kinder to others all day. Christianity at its best does that on the world scale. No fooling.

'Easy Bill' learns on the job

(Andrews in Denver Post, Mar. 18) Big Labor is furious at the Colorado law making it hard for union bosses to collect dues from workers unwilling to join. A bill to remove that protection flew through the legislature, only to die on Gov. Bill Ritter’s desk. Now the AFL-CIO threatens to run the Democratic convention out of Denver unless their pickpocket proposal is revived. Ritter says he won’t be bullied, but stay tuned. Remember that our new chief executive, Kerry-style, was for the labor bill before he was against it. The battle for the governor’s soul, on this and many other issues, has barely begun.

Bill Ritter has the great political gift of not seeming like a politician. Yet unlike his predecessors – from Republicans John Love and John Vanderhoof, through fellow Democrats Dick Lamm and Roy Romer and down to the recently departed Bill Owens – this governor has skillfully marketed himself with a slogan, Kennedy-style: the Colorado Promise. Nice work for a rookie.

The trouble with a slogan is that it will stick you if you don’t stick to it. Ritter’s honeymoon ended when two inconvenient truths came out. First it transpired, to the dismay of business, the press, and the public, that the candidate had given his union allies a quiet pledge to support the controversial bill. Then it was labor’s turn for an unpleasant surprise, as Ritter yielded to the outcry, broke his word, and cast a veto. Gov. Promise was damaged goods overnight.

According to KOA’s Mike Rosen, we who labeled this a rookie mistake should lose our pundit licenses. He calls the veto a masterstroke, demonstrating Ritter’s integrity and positioning him as a bipartisan triangulator, Clinton-style. I don’t buy that. The governor narrowly escaped a trap of his own making. Blaming the mess on inexperience is generous, if anything. Maybe it reveals an artful dodger behind the disarming smile – again, think Bill Clinton.

As with any betrayal in love or war, trust took a beating in this episode, and it won’t soon be restored. The saber-rattling by labor over DNC 2008 proves that. Business does not signal its displeasure by threats of kneecapping, but you know the chamber types are equally suspicious and sore at Ritter. When the big fella from Credibility Gap starts in with his “promise” rhetoric, eyes now roll on both sides of the aisle.

Somewhere in all this melodrama, a nickname waits our nimble-footed governor. “Switch Ritter” was the inspired suggestion of my radio partners, Krista Kafer and Joshua Sharf. Another we might try for size is “Easy Bill.” Think of all the ways that one applies.

Labor found Bill agreeable to a whispered signature promise, business equally so to a loudly demanded veto. He had an easy path to nomination last summer and to election last fall; only this winter did the price of insufficient vetting come due. The campaign did reveal that back in his prosecutor days, Easy Bill was quick with a plea bargain – and frequently even gentle with illegal-alien felonies. But how he eased his way home from Africa after that driving fatality, was never much discussed.

An easier life for Coloradans is foreseen in Ritter’s policy promises, if you share his preference for government solutions at the expense of personal responsibility and free markets. For a lot of us, though, Easy Bill’s premise invalidates his promise. Increased command and control over energy, health care, education, and transportation may not lead to a better future after all.

Our state will see between now and 2011, because that’s the Ritter route, the path the voters chose. We’ll also see whether or not his inaugural words, “The Colorado Promise is… about finding the strength in all of us,” bespeak an inner core of strength and principle in Easy Bill himself.

Anti-Americans among us

(Andrews in Denver Post, Mar. 4) “Excessive, that’s the word. Any European can instantly spot us Americans by our excessiveness. I lived there for years, and I know.” The instructor had asked our discussion group to sum up America in a word, much as St. Paul once cast all Cretians as “liars and beasts.” An affluent-looking man in a jogging suit answered first, scorn in his voice: We are an excessive people.

Americans, he said, consume too much, talk too loud, presume more than we should. Others leveled similar criticisms. America is grossly materialistic. America is overly assertive.

Everyone’s assertiveness so far had been on the side of self-dislike. Aren’t we a generous people as well, the instructor prompted. Now voices chimed in from the other side. Americans are optimistic, innovative, resourceful, religious. We’re spirited and confident. We’re friendly.

Were the boosters entirely right? No. Did the critics have a point? Sure. But on that Sunday here in the land of liberty, the lap of plenty, I was troubled at the sourness toward our country expressed by some of my neighbors. I was struck by the hesitancy of others to admit their patriotic pride. I saw anti-Americanism, the virus from abroad, now infecting the homeland.

Anti-Americanism denies that the United States is a force for good in the world and a noble chapter in human history. It indicts our nation – and its people, you and me – for a dark litany of crimes, flaws, transgressions, and omissions. It ignores America’s virtues and magnifies our deficiencies. It abandons perspective, unleashing envy and ingratitude,

The anti-Americans are like spoiled children. They confuse imperfection with malice, resent what belongs to others, and condemn as abuse any refusal to indulge them – while petulantly demanding avoidance of consequences and continued enjoyment of unearned benefits.

This infantile mindset obviously serves the fanaticism of an Ahmadinejad in Iran, the opportunism of a Chavez in Venezuela, the cynicism of a Putin in Russia, or the chauvinism of a Chirac in France. But the United States is resourceful and generous enough to deal with all those. It helps that we know many of their own people admire America and would love to come here.

Whether we can survive the spread of anti-Americanism among Americans themselves is another question. Disavowal of our country’s fundamental goodness, blindness to the evidence of how many people she has liberally blessed for so long, denial of America’s worthiness to lead the world – these attitudes gaining among our elites do constitute a deadly virus.

The virus infects “citizen of the world” news organizations such as CNN and the New York Times; universities such as Harvard, Stanford and yes, CU; sneering columnists such as Paul Krugman and Garrison Keillor; powerful lobbies such as the ACLU and the NEA teacher union; and of course, politicians such as Congressman John Murtha and Senator John Kerry.

America today sends abroad “a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy,” branding us an “international pariah,” Kerry told the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last month. With such talk from the man who came within 130,000 votes of being president, the apologetic ambivalence toward America in my discussion group isn’t surprising.

For many of us, though, the watchword is still “America without apologies, America as it was meant to be.” Our land shines bright even as it strives toward unrealized ideals. Not for us the elite vision of convergence with Europe: borders erased, enterprise stifled, liberty fading, birth rates falling, Islam ascendant, faith censored and secularism supreme.

Millions here, thank God, still have patriot bloodlines and a backbone. Not for us the bile of ingratitude. Not for us the anti-American virus.

Judges coddled by sweetheart reviews

(Denver Post, Feb. 18) “Ninety-nine and 44/100 percent pure.” Remember the old Ivory Soap slogan? It made the sensible point that if you start with a really clean cleaning agent, everything else will clean up better as a result. Squeaky clean is certainly what Coloradans want with our judges, entrusted as they are with interpreting the laws, punishing wrongdoers, and dispensing justice. So you will be glad to learn that by one yardstick, voter approval, state judges are better than 99 percent perfect. It sounds improbable, but the statistic is easy to calculate.

In nine elections since the judicial performance review system began in 1988, over a thousand judges have faced the voters for retention or dismissal. Fewer than one percent were dismissed (seven, to be exact). Only 13 were even recommended as “do not retain” by the sweetheart-minded performance commissions. Be my Valentine, your honor?

State Sen. Ted Harvey (R-Douglas County) thinks these lopsided numbers signal near-impotence in the review process, not near-perfection in the courts. With the goal of keeping judges more on their toes and providing voters better guidance on retention, he proposed Senate Bill 142. Its quick death in committee last week says much about the sad state of self-government today.

The Harvey bill offered six reforms to invigorate the judicial performance commissions. It provided broader input and tougher criteria in evaluating each judge – including fidelity to the constitution. It granted the commissions greater independence, moved against conflicts of interest, and added a mid-term review for powerful appellate judges. The recommendation to retain a judge, or not, would have appeared on the ballot.

All this was tame, by my lights. But then I was a proponent of last year’s Amendment 40, ten years and out for members of the Colorado Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. SB-142 was far gentler. No hint of term limits, nor even of such reasonable ideas as a balance of commissioners between political parties, statewide geographic representation, or disqualifying government employees and ex-judges from commission seats.

The few mild improvements which the bill did include were too much for the Senate Judiciary Committee, however. Majority Democrats voted it down with scarcely a word of discussion, taking their cue from the scornful opposition testimony of Colorado Bar Association spokesman D. A. Bertram.

Lawyers and judges just understand each other so well, you know, and as for citizen oversight – well, three’s a crowd. Some “tweaking” might benefit the present rubber-stamp process, Bertram admitted – but this Republican bill risked “putting judges into politics,” and goodness, we can’t have that. As if judges in politics and politics in judging were not an epidemic problem already.

How the bill could possibly politicize anything, committee chairman Brandon Shaffer and vice-chair John Morse did not ask attorney Bertram. But Sen. Morse did ask me (testifying next) why the eminence and respectability of our judges wouldn’t naturally prompt them to step down “when they should,” with no need for the tougher scrutiny and potential indignity promised by SB-142.

The American way of monitoring those who hold power, I replied, is summed up in Reagan’s motto: “Trust but verify.” Colorado’s judicial performance reviews were established to do that, 20 years after we quit electing our judges. Now, after 20 years, that ridiculous 99 percent pass rate cries out for verifying better.

The rarity of dismissals indicates a broken system, Republican Sen. Shawn Mitchell argued to his committee colleagues. But the bill died anyway on a party-line vote. So our courts will continue with a dysfunctional status quo in which, among other absurdities, the Chief Justice’s report card is written by a panel where her own appointees hold the deciding voice. Politics as usual: no wonder so many people are alienated.

Reagan was right: We're overgoverned

(Andrews in Denver Post, Feb. 4) In our country and our state today, government is too big, growing too fast, too intrusive in our lives, costs too much, and delivers too little value for the dollar. I say so in homage to Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004, whose birthday is Tuesday. For Americans as a free people, two centuries into our republican experiment with liberty and responsibility, government is not the solution – it is the problem. That’s as true now as when President Reagan asserted it in his 1981 inaugural, never mind the pendulum swing of polls and parties since then.

Picture University Boulevard at evening rush hour. The snowy street was jammed. While Bob eased his SUV through the traffic, Art and Jack peppered me (the only politician among four of us coming back from skiing) with complaints about the apparently broken system evidenced by last fall’s campaign and this winter’s new officeholders.

Why all the negative ads, they grouched; why the platitudes and the sleaze? Why so many hacks jostling for power? And once in power, why the selfish grabs for advantage by each side? Why not more bipartisanship, more regard for the common good, more deference to world opinion? The ride home grew uncomfortably long as I parried the well-meant barrage.

As a constitutional conservative – that is, a believer in natural law and a realist about fallen humanity – I had rational answers for these familiar gripes from the minister, the oilman, and the financial guy. Faux unanimity is usually a mask for devilry, my line went. If fierce two-party competition seems messy, try a dozen parties splintering ideologically – or one party tyrannizing us all.

Democracy is indeed, as Churchill admitted, the worst system – except for all the others ever invented. The others weren’t buying it. “Yes but,” they objected as I gave each defense for America’s time-tested polity. Citizen disgruntlement (you’ve felt it too) hung like smog inside the crawling Toyota.

What finally reached these skeptics was the curse of scale. Suppose each of the many cars here on University took up four times the pavement it does now, I jabbed. Double our vehicle’s length and width, do the same to all these others in what is already close to gridlock, and the quadrupled burden would jam things completely, wouldn’t it?

Now I had them, because that’s exactly what has happened to the scale of government in American society since our grandparents’ time. From the founding to World War I, as the United States was creating unprecedented opportunity and widespread affluence, government at all levels took only about 10% of the national wealth. In America 2007 it takes about 40%.

Today’s quadrupled burden of “rendering to Caesar” is the worst cause of democratic dysfunction in our once lightly-governed republic. Pumping unhealthy amounts of money and power through government, as we now do, inevitably corrupts public life – even as it saps private initiative and enervates personal virtue.

This column was going to be about some bad bills in the legislature that would dump the Electoral College (SB-46), monkey with campaign spending (HB-1074), and collectivize the workplace (HB-1072). I was also readying choice words for Pelosi’s power play on pharmaceuticals, Schwarzenegger’s socialized medicine scheme, Ritter’s plan to rig the energy market, and this newspaper’s push for higher taxes.

The SUV saga overtook all of those. But each is a symptom of the national malady I’ve diagnosed here. Collectivism and over-government are choking our sweet land of liberty. No exaggeration, they are. What’s the cure, short of a smashup and a new start from the ruins? Reagan would say we’d better start asking ourselves.