What Bruce Benson knows

(Denver Post, Mar. 2) “The Idea of a University” is the title of a classic work by the scholar and churchman John Henry Newman. Recently it has also been the subject of a contentious public seminar polarizing Coloradans. Some acted as if the University of Colorado belongs exclusively to under-age students, self-important faculty, and the Democratic Party. Others saw the idea of a university as involving a civic trusteeship and the transmission of truth, along with the search for more truth. With this came a different idea of who owns CU. When the regents confirmed entrepreneur and philanthropist Bruce Benson as CU’s new president on Feb. 20, the seminar recessed with the grownups in control – for now. But the battle for the soul of higher education in our state is far from over.

Benson’s liberal detractors didn’t like it that he made his fortune getting energy out of the ground, headed the Republican Party and backed its candidates, and sat for no extra degrees after graduating from Boulder in geology. So what?

In his favor were proven executive ability, experience as Metro State board chairman, and notable successes as a bipartisan coalition-builder and financial rainmaker. He’ll be a worthy successor to outgoing president Hank Brown.

Profiles in courage during the campaign to stop Benson included two regents who turned on him after voting yes in the finalist round on Jan. 30, the spineless Democrat Cindy Carlisle and the GOP maverick Paul Schauer; the vandal who scrawled “right-wing nut” across his portrait in a classroom building he had donated; and hypocritical Alice Madden, state House Majority Leader.

Madden first called the nomination “a really bad joke.” She then organized a letter from Democrats that labeled Benson’s association with Trailhead Group campaign ads as “most disconcerting.” It didn’t mention her own role in bare-knuckle tactics against the GOP in 2004 and 2006. Nor did it condemn former CSU president Al Yates for his “foot on throat” attack plan against Republican Bob Schaffer in this year’s Senate race, which surfaced Jan. 29. Double standard, anyone?

As Bruce Benson ran the gauntlet of CU stakeholders, some pristine-green undergrads hammered him about being in the oil and gas industry, from which they suggested he should now divest. Try doing without oil and gas, the nominee retorted. It was his finest hour. I’ll bend but not bow to get this job, Benson signaled. It was like McCain saying he’d rather lose an election than a war.

Understanding the real world, he implied, doesn’t require a terminal degree; indeed common sense terminates as over-education mounts. To insist, as many of us do, that the idea of a university involves the transmission of truth, is ultimately to insist on truth itself –and hence to reject intellectual, cultural, and moral relativism, the disease of academia today.

Precisely because Benson is no egghead, he is the right man for CU now. He knows that fossil fuels have made the world better, and that markets are more likely than bureaucrats to develop the new energy sources to make it better still. He knows you don’t do science, on climate or anything else, by consensus. He knows that America is good, and that partisan politics protect free government.

He knows that all cultures don’t work equally well, and that Western civilization works best of all. He knows the Constitution is a written document, not a living organism. He knows war is an ever-present danger, and armies are necessary. He knows Marx was mostly wrong, Christ and Moses were mostly right.

We the people, most of us anyway, also know these truths. As owners of the University of Colorado, we want them transmitted there – not by dogmatic indoctrination but with open discussion in an atmosphere of maturity and common sense. That’s our charge to the new president.

If the Republicans fracture

(Denver Post, Feb. 17) Was it hearing of Dennis Kucinich’s encounter with spacemen? Or was it seeing the ex-Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown, doing TV commentary? Something sent me on an out-of-body experience the other night, a sci-fi trip into the future – and it was scary. I was driving home after my radio show, haunted by Mike Littwin’s prediction about John McCain’s detractors: “The Limbaugh Republicans will eventually vote for him, but the Dobson Republicans, who knows? They may not.” Suddenly my car was a tiny dot far below, and then it was caucus night 2012. Nine of us lonely Republicans huddled in a school library that had held hundreds for previous caucuses. Out in the corridor were five caucus-goers of the feisty little Tory Party that had formed around Ann Coulter and James Dobson after McCain wrested the 2008 nomination from Romney and Huckabee. Three hundred Democrats packed the gym.

Caucus business quickly done, we brooded over the dramatic events of President Barack Obama’s first term. Despite campaign gaffes, foot-dragging by the Clintonistas, and his maturity deficit against the GOP’s war-hero nominee, Obama and VP Nancy Pelosi won the popular vote and narrowly took the Electoral College over Sen. McCain and Condoleeza Rice.

Fittingly, it was Colorado’s nine electoral votes that made the difference. “That’ll show’em,” a Tory leader in Colorado Springs told Fox after McCain’s midnight concession speech. The President-elect rewarded state Democrats by naming Federico Pena as treasury secretary and Ken Salazar as interior secretary. Gov. Ritter elevated Diana DeGette to the Senate vacancy.

Helped by the Republican fracture, Dems had taken 58 Senate seats; after Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins switched parties, Harry Reid could now break any filibuster. DeGette’s embryonic stem-cell bill sailed through and was signed in Obama’s first hundred days. He inked the repeal of Bush’s partial-birth abortion ban the same day.

Tory radio hosts, already demoralized, grew more so after September 11, 2009, when Al Qaeda took down a dozen airliners over the US, Britain, and Canada in a single hour. Aboard one of them, tragically, was Chief Justice John Roberts. Obama appointed arch-liberal Laurence Tribe to replace him, and picked Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison to chair a commission on why they hate us.

McCain, now as lonely a voice in the Senate as Churchill had been in Parliament before 1939, pointed out that the Patriot Act and FISA surveillance could probably have averted the Second 9/11. But few listened, especially after the Super Fairness Doctrine was signed, muzzling conservative voices on cable and the Internet as well as talk radio.

Did I mention it was depressing, that GOP caucus I magically attended in 2012? It was the pits. Speaker Charles Rangel had passed a black reparations bill in 2009. The Tribe court had ordered gay marriage in 2010. Israel had fallen in 2011. Why didn’t thinking Republicans work harder to prevent the 2008 schism, we sat there asking each other.

The upside, we told ourselves, was Barack’s vulnerability for reelection against Condi or Newt or Jeb. Even Huck and Rudy were talking of a comeback. Chances seemed good, considering the recession triggered by Rangel’s huge tax increase, along with global tension over an Al Qaeda-dominated Iraq, an Iran with nukes, and a China that had seized Taiwan while the US stood by.

Predictably, Obama-Care was way over budget and already unpopular. Thankfully, his Supreme Court nomination of Bill Clinton, a payoff to Hillary for the DNC deal on super-delegates, had failed. Republican hopes were reviving. But what a price to pay for getting America’s conservative party unified and competitive again.

Then, snap! I was back at the wheel, and it was still 2008. Heaven protects day-dreaming pundits. Headlights showed my garage door going up. My party might still avert self-destruction.

George Soros, meet John Jay

(Denver Post, Feb. 3) Precinct caucuses are coming up on Tuesday. If you’re registered with a party, be there. You can vote in the presidential poll and help choose candidates for local, state, and federal offices, as well as issues for the party platforms. If you go to a Republican caucus, the other participants were probably at church or synagogue this weekend. If you’re at a Democratic caucus, it’s likely they were not. Surveys show that Americans who worship at least weekly tend to vote with the GOP by about 60-40. Those who worship less often, vote with the Dems by a similar margin. This doesn’t make either party better, but it’s one of the sharp differences between them. Asked what issues will frame the 2008 campaign, members of a DU adult class I’m teaching with David Sirota put religion second on the list, right behind the war. Also near the top were the economy, health care, taxes, and the role of government.

After Sirota elicited these suggestions and jotted them on the board, it was my turn to cross-examine. How had such concerns, I probed, helped Republicans win seven of ten presidential elections since 1968? Specifically, where did religion come in? The class is mostly liberals (which I’m enjoying), and one answered: “Abortion and homosexuality.”

True, but the explanation goes deeper. Faced with a string of Supreme Court rulings devaluing religion, and with a Manhattan-Berkeley-Hollywood axis scorning moral absolutes and spiritual faith, traditionally-minded Americans of both parties rallied around GOP candidates for a defense of the old values, “the way we were.”

Defense of marriage and the unborn was part of it, sure, but so was defense of our national identity and security. Baptist Jimmy Carter lost reelection after dismissing the “inordinate fear of communism” and embracing a declinist view of the future. Divorcee Ronald Reagan won twice with “city on a hill” biblical optimism and a forward strategy against the Soviet “evil empire.”

The Bush-Clinton struggle since 1992 has reflected many of these same disagreements. In 2000, a tree-hugger bent on saving the planet was edged out by an evangelical saved from drink. Substitute radical Jihadism for communism, and you realize that our 2008 debates aren’t so different from those of 1972 or 1984.

The political force of America’s enduring self-image as a nation under God, what Lincoln called “this almost-chosen people,” will be my message to that room-full of older progressives when our DU course wraps up on Feb. 6. Will they get it? Probably not as well as the class of younger conservatives I met with a month ago.

These were a dozen grad students at the John Jay Institute for Faith, Society, and Law in Colorado Springs. Though Jay is sometimes called the forgotten Founder, Kenneth Starr terms him “the father of American conservatism.” Co-author of the Federalist Papers and the nation’s first Chief Justice, he insisted morality and religion were indispensable to ordered liberty. The John Jay Institute insists they still are.

Conducting one-year academic fellowships and a lecture series, the newly-formed institute and its scholarly president, Alan Crippen, are not a militia “waging war against the separation of church and state” as secularists fumed in a Gazette article on Nov. 11 (reprinted in the Washington Post). They are a voice of reason -- yet politely subversive even so.

Fellow Adrienne Moorehead told the Gazette that natural law, asserted by constitutionalists from Thomas Jefferson to Clarence Thomas, must again have its day. Fellow Brandon Showalter spoke of a career in service to “God’s design for the social order.” Incendiary talk indeed.

George Soros and Tim Gill may call the tune in this election cycle, but soon enough it’s a good bet we’ll be hearing more from Showalter, Moorehead, Crippen, and John Jay.

Resist political seduction

(Denver Post, Jan. 20) Who do you like for President? Many Americans this year seem inclined to answer that question with another: What’s today? The polls are volatile. We’ve already seen surprises, and we’ll see more. This was going to be a column endorsing Romney. The straight-arrow entrepreneur is my guy. If Mitt quits, I’m for gruff Fred Thompson. I was also going to say that McCain and Huckabee, big-government egotists, are my least favorite – though preferable to any Democrat. As it turns out, I’m not here to tell you any of that. (Notice the deft use of paralipsis, the rhetorical trick of mentioning something by claiming not to. “Won’t make an issue of my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” as Reagan quipped in 1984. Huck similarly backhanded Romney with that Iowa attack ad he “decided not to air.” Isn’t politics fun?)

It is in fact the fun of politics, the seductive, addictive, distracting, and potentially debilitating nature of this great spectator sport, this endlessly entertaining circus of something for nothing, that I want to warn all of us about, me included, before election year 2008 gets any crazier – which you know it will.

Why seductive? Why debilitating? Because politics, the allocation and application of government power, is not the main thing for individuals and communities in a free society. The main thing is personal effort, self-responsibility, and the uplifting of the human spirit. Political decisions are no more than a means to that end, never an end in themselves.

It is too easy to think otherwise, however, lazy and careless creatures that we are. “You’re from the government, and you have to help me,” we demand – overlooking what an old laugh line we’ve just uttered. Forgotten are the ten most empowering words in the language: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” So subtly does political seduction occur.

They may throw me out of the Republican Party for saying this, but here goes: In many ways, it doesn’t matter who is elected President next fall. America’s national security, economic vitality, and adherence to justice are of tremendous importance to our own people and the world, no question. The two parties differ honorably about these.

But my side isn’t all wisdom and saints, nor is the other all folly and scoundrels. Whoever wins will govern largely between the 40-yard lines. While Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama in the White House isn’t my preference, even less than Sen. McCain, the country will be okay. Talk of ruin is moonshine. Great nations can withstand a lot of “ruin,” observed Adam Smith.

The seduction of politics, which we must have the backbone to resist, happens when citizens – on the left or the right, both are susceptible – regard agencies and laws, taxes and budgets, as a magic box from which solutions to imperfection and scarcity can be expected. No such solutions exist, and we court moral bankruptcy by banking on them.

Freedom won’t work unless enough of us practice four essentials of citizenship, writes Thomas Krannawitter of the Claremont Institute. We need self-assertion to defend our liberties, self-restraint to behave responsibly, self-reliance to avert dependency, and civic knowledge to participate constructively. Simple, aren’t they? Yet far from easy.

And now consider how poorly these qualities are fostered today by many of our nation’s families, schools, corporations, media, entertainers, government programs, and even churches. Think how often candidates and campaigns promote the exact opposite: passivity, indulgence, blaming, and sloganeering. That road does lead to ruin.

Alexander Hamilton said America is an experiment in governing ourselves by “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” More important than who’s elected this year is how we go about it. Are we a stampeding herd or a free people, choosing reflectively? The world is watching.

Ritter's bad year

(Denver Post, Jan. 6) It was Monday, Dec. 10, and Bill Ritter had a choice to make. His secret trip to Iraq and Afghanistan would leave shortly, but Colorado was in shock. Five were dead and several others wounded in the state’s worst outbreak of mass violence since Columbine. Vicious bigotry was evident in the attacks on two religious centers. Jefferson County and El Paso County were reeling. Should the governor proceed to Baghdad as planned? Or should he stay home, help Coloradans grieve, work on making sense of the bloody Sunday, and begin to heal? Ritter flew off for what was essentially a photo op with the troops, peripheral to his job description. Youth With a Mission and New Life Church mourned without him.

Given the sacrifices our neighbors on active duty are making over there, this wasn’t an awful decision; but I believe it was a mistake. That week, amid that horror, the place governor was needed most was right here. It continued the disappointing pattern of Bill Ritter, Year One: his lack of a steady compass to show true north.

As a Republican, of course, a Beauprez supporter in 2006 and a candidate for governor myself in 1990, I’d predictably differ with many policies of this Democrat who became Colorado’s 41st chief executive last January. But it’s on leadership, not policy, that I give him low marks. Even granting the worthiness of Gov. Ritter’s goals, his freshman-year effectiveness in pursuing them has been unimpressive.

All of Ritter’s big headlines in 2007 were about the guy surprising people, and not pleasantly. That’s not how you cast a vision, keep a coalition together, and lead.

In office less than a month, he scared business by letting the labor-giveaway bill, HB-1072, reach his desk – then wrong-footed unions and the legislature by vetoing it. But late in the year he paid unions back with an email executive order decreeing collective bargaining (and higher costs, and potential strikes) for all 32,000 state employees.

His recent approval of energy drilling on the Roan Plateau, though welcome to some of us, was a nasty surprise to environmental groups who had believed his campaign promise of “Never.” His signature on a property-tax hike startled TABOR supporters, who are now suing him over it.

The only logic to Ritter’s zigzagging is pressure, not principle. Threats from James Hoffa Jr. extorted the “labor partnership” deal, after newspaper opposition and corporate outrage had peeled him away from signing HB-1072. Editorial pounding and higher-ed revenue appeals likewise forced his Roan surrender.

It does seem that this governor, for all his Boy Scout demeanor in the 2006 campaign, took office without a compass. Who knows which way he will veer next? The answer matters to our pocketbooks, because Easy Bill is now vacillating between four tax-increase options for the 2008 ballot: health care, transportation, K-12 education, and colleges.

Again, I disagree with taxing Colorado families more heavily for any of these misgoverned activities. But the Ritter stall, parking all of them with study groups for the past year, is another symptom of indecisiveness. Where Speaker Pelosi had the Hundred Hours and FDR had the Hundred Days, our governor has the hundred delays.

Yet people like Bill Ritter, wish him well, and seem pretty contented with the job he’s done so far. Approval ratings close to 70% in recent polls must have spelled happy holidays for him, no matter what this paper says. Thunderous warnings from the Post, back in November, that he might end up a one-term governor may be very premature.

President Bill Clinton also had a rocky first year, and a worse second year, before recovering to win easy reelection. President Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, had four directionless years and then goodbye. Will Ritter find true north before 2010?