Andrews' Christmas Carol

(Denver Post, Dec.16) 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,” Kathleen 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 Wednesday.” 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 a Hillary 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 2027. 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.”

Where are the great?

(Denver Post, Dec. 2) Midgets everywhere. Rappers, starlets, shrinks, scolds, facilitators, litigators, hustlers, hucksters, victims, vegans. Ours is the age of the shallow, the small, the squalid. Where are the great? “There were giants in the earth in those days,” says Genesis. Granted, every era magnifies the memory of bygone times. But what now passes for excellence in manhood and womanhood, thought and expression, moral and civic life, would make our grandparents shake their heads. For a third of a century we’ve lived in a house I call Marcus Bend, after my mother’s father, who helped buy it. I’m here surrounded with books and mementoes as the old year wanes, sobered by Christmas clamor, candidate noise and war news, wondering and worrying: Where are the great?

Stacked on the desk are “From Dawn to Decadence” by Jacques Barzun, “America: The Last Best Hope” by William Bennett, “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis, Winston Churchill’s memoir “My Early Life,” an FDR biography by Conrad Black, books on Chesterton and John Paul II, “The Western Canon” by Harold Bloom, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” and his Harvard address. Collectively they look upon 2007 and frown.

The scholarly Barzun, who turned 100 last week, is a great man of our time and a worthy judge of greatness. His book, a history of civilization from 1500 to the present, warns of today’s “urge to build a wall against the past…a revulsion from things in the present that seem a curse from our forebears.”

He writes of the 20th century as a time when elements that “made the nation-state the carrier of civilization… a common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service… were decaying and could not be restored.” He hopes for a 22nd century when boredom may stir new “radicals” to study afresh the old texts, “the record of a fuller life,” from which the West then rediscovers “what a joy it is to be alive.” Of the present century Jacques Barzun is less hopeful.

By what sickness of the soul could America and other nations blessed with the heritage of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia come to see all of this as “a curse from our forebears?” Solzhenitsyn, another contemporary great, gives the diagnosis:

“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer…. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty.” It is not true, insists the Russian giant, that “man is above everything.” Nor is it right that “man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all.”

Courage, faith, integrity, and honor, ordinary virtues harnessed to extraordinary gifts, constitute human greatness or the potential for it. Guy McBride, retired president of the Colorado School of Mines, and Vernon Grounds, retired president of Denver Seminary, have that heroic stature with me. Some of those books I’ve found so inspiring, by or about the great, reached me through them.

Great souls ennoble our world in big and little ways. Think of the late Bill Hosokawa of the Denver Post, or former Sen. Bill Armstrong. Is there a touch of that in Peter Groff, recently chosen as Colorado Senate President? We’ll see.

Over the centuries, nations flourish and fade in a cycle, the Scots philosopher Alexander Tytler is supposed to have said. Out of bondage come faith and courage, then liberty and abundance. But when these breed complacency and apathy, dependence ensues and bondage returns. If this sounds like an American self-portrait, we need to value greatness more.

The Remnant and the President

(Denver Post, Nov. 18) “Out there in Colorado, what is the remnant looking for in a president?" The editor of a conservative magazine had called from Washington to talk about the 2008 race. His question surprised me at first. We’re often considered flyover country by those DC types. But in today’s polarized electorate, Colorado matters more. Gore would have won in 2000 with our handful of electoral votes; Kerry in 2004 with ours and another state our size. A bright teenager knows that much. My friend’s term “the remnant” was less familiar. He didn’t just mean Republicans or conservatives. He meant those of us who care deeply about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the natural-law worldview underlying them. We who try to think about government in the 21st century as did Jefferson in the 18th century, Lincoln in the 19th, and Reagan in the 20th. Around a remnant, an unbowed faithful few, Athens withstood Sparta, Rome overcame Carthage, Moses’ followers and Jesus’ followers rallied. Britain drove off the Armada, Christendom repelled Islam at Vienna, patriots weathered Valley Forge. The pilgrims we honor at Thanksgiving were another remnant who changed history.

Colorado’s constitutional remnant is not a GOP majority, not yet, but that’s our goal. You’ll find us in places like the legislature’s Republican Study Committee, the Independence Institute, the family institute, and the taxpayers’ union; on Mike Rosen’s radio show or mine; lunching with Claremont’s conservative conspiracy group or plotting at the monthly center-right coffee.

As election year approaches, what we’re looking for in a president is fidelity to America’s founding principles and backbone for tough times. We believe in rights endowed by God, consent of the governed, limits on power, vigilance against predators, prudence amid uncertainty. We want a chief executive does too.

We value but distrust the parties. Two cheers for the GOP, so prone to expediency. One cheer for the Dems, coercive utopians much of the time – but thank goodness they’re here to keep the Republicans honest. Apart from the rare Democrat whom we could imagine in the White House, a Joe Lieberman or a Dick Lamm, we’re left to pick our presidential prospects among the R’s.

The remnant treasures history. When someone seeks our vote, we apply a “reminds me of” test. Governors whom we’ve known close up, perhaps even more than presidents we’ve watched from afar, become a yardstick.

John Love, affable as Eisenhower, resembled him in being too comfortable with big government. John Vanderhoof was our Jerry Ford, a legislative master lacking executive gifts. Bill Owens shared the open, confident style of fellow Texan George W. Bush; unfortunately neither proved as creatively and consistently conservative as their hero, Reagan. Colorado has yet to find its Reagan.

State governors like these good men and state legislators as I once was, along with congressmen and senators, are all sworn to “support” the U.S. Constitution. Only one American is under oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” that great charter of self-government and liberty: the President of the United States. Your and my participation in choosing that individual is a solemn trust. This is no homecoming popularity vote. This is for keeps.

Two former governors, three congressmen, a current and a former senator, and a former mayor, come as suitors to Colorado’s constitutional conservatives. Romney, Huckabee, Tancredo, Hunter, Paul, McCain, Thompson, or Giuliani – who will it be?

Though we of the remnant won’t decide the Republican nominee or the 2008 winner, we have our consciences to answer to. We prefer the wilderness with honor to office ill-gotten. We mean to restore the constitution, with the next president’s help if possible. Reagan is the gold standard, but he’s gone. Our choices are what they are. Bring on the primaries.

Element R and Justice Thomas

(Denver Post, Nov. 4) “Born on third base and thought he hit a triple,” Ann Richards’ supposed death cut on George H. W. Bush, was a failureand a falsehood both. The Bushes laughed last when the father won the presidency in 1988 and the son unseated Texas Gov. Richards in 1994. And each man’s political success was arguably in spite of, not because of, his genes. The Colorado Rockies’ pennant run, glorious despite our boys being swept in the World Series, got me thinking about where self-respect and success come from. Smugness and unearned privilege do corrode achievement. But victimhood, self-pity, and entitlement are equally corrosive.

“Born with two strikes against him and thought he was owed the ballgame” sums up this mentality. Justice Clarence Thomas, named to the Supreme Court in 1991 by the first President Bush, tells of seeing through it as an angry college student. Not even the ugliness of racism, he realized, changed the fact that “blacks could never hope to improve their lives until they took responsibility for them.”

Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, is the book of the year for Americans tired of politics as usual. Element R, the responsibility movement launched in this column on July 15, aimed at transcending rigid ideologies with a simple “send me” ethic, has a new hero in Myers Anderson, the dirt-poor small businessman who raised young Clarence and his brother in segregated Savannah.

Daddy, as the boys called him, “wouldn’t listen to any excuses for failure,” Thomas writes. “’Old Man Can’t is dead – I helped bury him,’ he said.” When the disillusioned seminarian was radicalized by the King assassination, rage turned him from Myers’ self-reliant model. But in praying remorsefully after a riot at Harvard, he decided “Daddy had been right all along: the only hope I had of changing the world was to change myself first.”

The Clarence Thomas of those days was still a man of the left who voted for George McGovern though thinking him “a bit too conservative.” Yet in dorm debates with fellow law student John Bolton (who would later serve the current President Bush as UN ambassador), the scholarly grandson grasped what his uneducated grandfather always knew:

“I saw [that] real freedom meant independence from government intrusion, which in turn meant that you had to take responsibility for your own decisions. When the government assumes that responsibility, it takes away your freedom – and wasn’t freedom the very thing for which blacks in America were fighting?”

If Element R ran candidates, our Clarence Thomas for President bandwagon would be rolling like the Red Sox. As Taft once went from White House to court, Thomas might now go the other direction. We’d put Bill Cosby on the ticket with him, honoring the funnyman’s serious book, “Come On, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” and dooming the comical Stephen Colbert candidacy.

The nonpartisan responsibility movement isn’t about electing people, though. Rather our goal, as I wrote in this summer’s prospectus, is to create bottom-up pressure on everyone in public life – politicians, interest groups, news and entertainment media, educators, clergy – to stop blaming, stop excusing, start owning up and stepping up, Daddy-style.

“Me, look no further.” From Eve in the garden to George Washington in the orchard to Ike in his letter if D-Day should fail, that unflinching acceptance of responsibility expresses the best of human character. Its rarity today attests how much our country needs Element R.

Be who you are, use what you have, do what you can, an old primer teaches. In this spirit America was birthed, her wrongs righted -- in part; the work continues – and her greatest victories won. Myers Anderson, illiterate though he was, would say amen to the primer. So would Clint Hurdle and his Rockies.

To improve local elections

Why this column freaked out the Dems: Click here. (Denver Post, Oct. 21) Has your ballot come in the mail yet? Mine just did. Yes, it’s a local election year – even though we’re already tired of the presidential candidates wooing us for next year, and still getting used to the new governor we elected last year. Two things concern me here. First, the candidates for city council and school board are a generic list, lacking the party labels we see when electing county commissioners, sheriffs and district attorneys, or state and federal officials. Second, I’m bothered that the ballot came in the mail at all.

Neither is good. The principles of self-government in our republic, consent of the governed and limitations on power, would work better if political parties weren’t excluded at the local level – and if personal responsibility hadn’t been overtaken by mass convenience in the voting process itself. Think about it as you study your ballot.

My wife and I vote, for example, in Centennial and the Cherry Creek school district. For city council in our ward, the options are George Shen and Patrick Anderson. For school board, we can pick between Jim O’Brien and Jennifer Herrera for one seat, Steve de Carteret and Randy Perlis for another. Grateful to them for running, it’s thankless and someone has to – but who are these people?

With some digging, one learns that the second name in each pair is a Democrat, while O’Brien and de Carteret “espouse Republican principles” (though the former isn't registered as such), and Shen is a Republican but barely out of college and in various ways not ready for prime time. For me as a GOP conservative, this makes the decision easier, though I’m still pondering.

It’s also dismaying to see council candidates running unopposed in two of Centennial’s remaining three wards, and to find that the Democratic incumbent in another ward has lined up his Republican fellow-councilmen as endorsers against two GOP challengers. Two of Cherry Creek’s four director districts likewise feature unopposed candidates.

These inscrutable nonpartisan local elections are a legacy of the Progressive era a hundred years ago, when faith in “scientific expertise” as a government panacea convinced many Americans that party platforms and loyalties were but a vehicle of selfishness, destined for history’s junkyard. What naïvete.

Our country’s broad, stable two-party system of R’s and D’s, enlivened by feisty upstarts such as the Greens and Libertarians, in fact performs a hugely valuable service for busy citizens both at election time and in between.

During campaigns the parties recruit, screen, and assist candidates, providing voters a recognized “brand” that signals what approach to government is on offer. The result is fewer empty ballot slots, fewer flaky office-seekers, and less guesswork when you sit down to vote. And once elected, party-affiliated candidates work together better and have a clearer standard to uphold; insider self-dealing and stealth are less rife.

A free society thrives on competition and information. You can’t have too much of either. On that logic, as a state senator, I repeatedly sought legislation to invite political parties into our school board races and RTD elections. We’d reap similar benefits if parties faced off in municipal politics.

My bills never stood a chance, though. Democrats (the same folks who are so proud of their national convention coming here next August, and so busy right now running undeclared slates in many localities) feigned horror at the “specter of partisanship,” and some Republicans gullibly believed them. Game over.

As for mail ballots themselves – almost the only kind being used this fall – a voter-fraud nightmare awaits as indifferent addressees toss them by the thousands, easy pickings for trash-bin scavengers. The culprit: a conspiracy of laziness between election officials and the public.

Voting is one of our sacred trusts as Americans. Is this the best we can do?