Taxpayer transparency: why not?

(Denver Post, Apr. 20) Suppose you had a business partner and he wouldn’t let you see the checkbook. You would think he’d gotten a big head, or no longer respected you, or forgotten the promises made to each other. You might even think he was stealing from you. Lots of people are serving time for doing just that. Now suppose that evasive so-and-so was an $18 billion behemoth called the State of Colorado. To make it worse, remember that for you and me as taxpayers, state government with its thousands of bureaucrats and officials isn’t just our partner. It’s our employee, our subordinate, our creature. Of course we can see its checkbook. Only we can’t. Taxpayers in Kansas can monitor their money online, check by check. A Democratic governor last year signed legislation requiring it. Alaskans can ride herd on their tax dollars through a convenient website as well. A Republican governor directed it by executive order two months ago. Same goes for Texas, Minnesota, South Carolina, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Louisiana. But not Colorado, not yet.

Americans aren’t anarchists. As free citizens we cherish our form of government, which we count on to fulfill its constitutional functions energetically. But we insist it be our servant, not our master. Many of us are concerned that government is too big, growing too fast, costs too much, intrudes too much in our lives, and delivers too little value for the dollar. And we often feel powerless to reverse that trend.

One step toward taking back the power is the taxpayer transparency movement that’s now gaining bipartisan support in state after state. President Thomas Jefferson, as suspicious of government as Douglas Bruce, summed up the idea in 1802: “We might hope to see the finances of the Union as clear and intelligible as a merchant’s books, so that every man of every mind should be able to comprehend them, to investigate abuses, and consequently to control them.”

What a simple, powerful reform. Take the state’s checkbook, scrub out confidential personal data, and put it up there in cyberspace for the whole world to see. State Rep. Don Marostica (R-Loveland) tried to get Colorado on board in 2007 with House Bill 1164, “concerning the disclosure of information related to expenditure of state moneys on a searchable website.” Bureaucrats hung a bloated $1.1 million fiscal note on the bill, and Democrats killed it in the first committee.

Inertia and caution were probably more to blame than partisanship. Gov. Kathleen Sibelius (D-KS) okayed the nation’s first transparency law, after all. Alaska State Sen. Bill Wielechowski (D-Anchorage), sponsor of a legislative followup to Gov. Sarah Palin’s executive order, enthuses: “Republicans and Democrats alike love this bill; nobody wants government waste.” Our own state treasurer, Democrat Cary Kennedy, now says she wants to realize Marostica’s goal administratively.

“We believe in making the state’s finances as transparent as possible,” Kennedy told me. She conveys sincerity, but what’s missing is urgency. Fifteen months after HB-1164 died, her working group is still working on it. Her transparency budget for the coming year is a meager $47,000. She speaks vaguely of some role for the State Controller, a mid-level Ritter appointee. Her own laudable innovation, the online Taxpayer Accountability Report, and something else called the Taxpayer Profile, have higher priority. Neither equals an open checkbook.

I give the treasurer only a C, and Gov. Bill Ritter gets an F on this issue. His budget director, Todd Saliman, seemed detached about it when I called, merely voicing support for Kennedy’s slow-motion efforts. And his press secretary, Evan Dreier, had never heard of taxpayer transparency.

They should get briefed at the movement’s website, www.atr.org, then give their boss Gov. Sibelius’s phone number: 877-KSWORKS. Because right now, when it comes to transparency, Kansas works and Colorado doesn’t.

Hope springs eternal for GOP in 2010

(Denver Post, Apr. 6) Sports mementos line the Denver Athletic Club, old photos recalling bygone glories. It was a good setting for the Republican gathering of eagles on March 27, when presidential nominee John McCain swept into town with former rival Mitt Romney at his side. Many of us at the fundraiser had bygone glories on our mind. We were gauging not only the prospects for a White House victory in 2008, but also the personnel for a Colorado comeback by the GOP in 2010 after years in the wilderness. What I saw was a roomful of intriguing possibilities. At a press conference earlier, US Sen. Wayne Allard and the candidate running to succeed him, former Rep. Bob Schaffer, stood flanking McCain. Hopes for electing both are buoyed by Schaffer’s resilience in the polls against Democrat Mark Udall and by the Obama-Clinton bloodbath to McCain’s benefit.

Such a double win could build Republican momentum for 2010, when all state offices are up. Should my party lose one or both races, on the other hand, dominance by Democrats in the state and in Washington might whet voters’ appetite for divided government next time. Either way, we’ll have a shot at denying reelection to Gov. Bill Ritter and US Sen. Ken Salazar.

But who, the athletic club crowd wondered, might be our starting team for these contests? Take the governor’s race first. Ritter has shown weak leadership, accomplished little, and alienated business with his labor moves. He can be had. Allard, former Sen. Hank Brown, former Rep. Scott McInnis, former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, businessman Pete Coors, or state Senate stars like Mark Hillman and Josh Penry could all run.

Challenging Salazar may be tougher, but his chameleon voting record spells vulnerability. Former Gov. Bill Owens, his 65% popularity intact and marital troubles behind him, might grab the brass ring this time after passing in 2004. Done with Congress, battle-tested from the presidential primaries, Tom Tancredo admits a Senate run in ’10 appeals to him. Former Rep. Bob Beauprez may have the itch as well.

For wild cards in either race, think about Attorney General John Suthers, assistant Senate leader Nancy Spence, radio host Dan Caplis, Colorado Springs kingmaker Steve Schuck, Bruce Benson after a couple of years running CU, education reformers Alex Cranberg and Ed McVaney, or restaurateur John Elway. (Yes, No. 7 does fantasize about recreating the Drive with voters.)

Now consider the GOP depth chart for down-ballot contests. Democratic Reps. John Salazar out west and Ed Perlmutter in the suburbs aren’t endangered this year but could be in 2010. Likewise Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien, State Treasurer Cary Kennedy, and Ritter’s potential appointee at Secretary of State – if Mike Coffman succeeds Tancredo. Who might take them on?

For Congress, think Penry or state Rep. Ellen Roberts against Salazar, district attorney Carol Chambers (if she’d move a few miles north) or state Rep. Rob Witwer against Perlmutter. Statewide candidates might include the House minority leader, bulldog Mike May, and some of his fellow legislators such as Reps. Cory Gardner, David Balmer, and Amy Stephens, or Sens. Shawn Mitchell and Mike Kopp.

Republican bench strength is great overall. Three of the four vying for 6th congressional – Coffman, Sens. Ted Harvey and Steve Ward, and entrepreneur Wil Armstrong – will figure in future elections somewhere. The 5th congressional insurgents, Jeff Crank and Bentley Rayburn, likely losers against Rep. Doug Lamborn this summer, might resurface later. Even Mark Holtzman and Rick O’Donnell, who left Colorado after their 2006 defeats, could dramatically return like Foote and Forsberg.

Elephant Republicans taking the hustings against donkey Democrats: there’s a timeless beauty to it, like National League meeting American League on the diamond. After 2008 comes the 2009 off-season, then 2010 and a whole new ballgame. Hope springs eternal.

Beware the conservative entitlement mentality

(Oklahoma Perspective, Feb. 2008) Which side of the political divide has the entitlement mentality? Democrats and liberals, of course. It’s our friends on the left, as everyone knows, who assume that money grows on trees, benefits rain down like manna, risk protection is for worry warts, hard work and deferred gratification are passe’. While that’s often true, we on the right have entitlement egg on our faces today. Ask Dennis Hastert, Bill Frist, and the late Republican Congress. A funny thing happened on the way to that permanent GOP majority; a thing called taking it for granted. Now it’s gone. The great conservative comedown of this decade hit Colorado before it swept through Washington DC. Complacency and apathy played a big part. The entitlement mentality of political success rose up and bit us. As an ally of this magazine's publisher, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, since its early days (when I was running a sister think tank in Denver), let me suggest some lessons for Oklahomans from our experience. [Editor: This was the cover story in OCPA's monthly magazine, subtitled .“Sobering Lessons from the Colorado Comedown.” Click the link to see the illustrated PDF.]

OCPA wisely avoids siding with either political party. Colorado’s Independence Institute does the same. Republican election results are still a good gauge of conservative trends, however. By that measurement, we peaked in 2002.

Gov. Bill Owens, cut from the same cloth as George W. Bush, won reelection in a landslide. The GOP held onto a US Senate seat, gained a congressional seat, and took back the State Senate. William J. Bennett, former education secretary under Reagan, told National Review that Owens was “America’s best governor.” He said Senate President John Andrews was “helping make Colorado the most conservative state in the country.”

Flattering, but premature. By the time term limits (which I helped enact in 1990, and still support) ended my tenure in 2004, Democrats were riding high again. Republicans lost both houses of the legislature that year for the first time in four decades. Dems also gained one each in the US Senate and House. In 2006 they recaptured the Governor’s office, added another US House seat, and widened their legislative majorities. Grateful party leaders awarded Denver the Democratic National Convention for August 2008.

How important was all this for Colorado in terms of public policy? The impact has been negative and huge. During the early Owens years, led by the party of limited government and individual freedom, our state saw tax cuts for income, sales, and capital gains; tougher accountability for public schools; expansion of charter schools; education vouchers for the poor; accelerated highway construction; defunding of public employee unions; a Defense of Marriage Act and defunding of Planned Parenthood. Bennett’s appraisal seemed realistic.

But after the reversal in 2004, Gov. Owens finished his term in retreat. Though casting over 100 defiant vetoes of liberal legislation, he pushed through a 2005 ballot issue to increase taxes and spending, gave ground on illegal immigration, and helped defeat my 2006 ballot issue that would have imposed judicial term limits. The popular congressman running to succeed him took over a divided GOP and lost badly to Democrat Bill Ritter, an ex-prosecutor and pro-lifer.

The party of unlimited government and collective solutions, with Ritter in charge, has romped at Coloradans’ expense since early 2007. Mandates for renewable energy, a slowdown in oil and gas exploration, gay adoption, and reinstatement of Planned Parenthood (so much for his pro-life claim) were among Ritter’s early moves. In November, bullied by James Hoffa Jr., he decreed collective bargaining for all state employees, a potential 30% bump in pay and benefits.

A universal health care tax, vehicle taxes, and a heavier petroleum severance tax are next on the governor’s list. He has a climate task force and wants a Carbon Fund. His education agenda features a mushy curriculum makeover, new obstacles for charters, and preschool for all. He’s strategizing to get rid of TABOR, our constitutional tax and spending limit that was weakened by his predecessor.

It’s all quite predictable, straight out of the progressive playbook. So where was the conservative playbook all this time? What in the world was wrong with our side?

If I knew, I’d be the next Karl Rove, and this article would be on Fox News. But my diagnosis of the shocking turnabout in Colorado is not in the realm of tactics and formulas, coalitions and polls. It’s in the realm of attitudes. Our problem was the conservative entitlement mentality of being too comfortably on top for too long. Our problem was taking it for granted.

Drinking their own bathwater, as the saying goes, is hazardous to the health of any group, including a political movement. Or believing their own press clips, to put it more politely. (Ouch, I guess that includes Owens and me.) Looking back with newfound humility, Colorado conservatives and Republicans can see that liberals and Democrats in our state were lean and hungry, stealthily planning and on the make, years ago when we were fat and unsuspecting. This didn’t happen overnight.

In 2000 they ran hard and took the State Senate so as to force redistricting into the courts. That same year they passed a school spending mandate designed to cripple TABOR. We were rolled. In 2002 they snuck a campaign finance scheme into the constitution that hamstrung business and gave labor a tenfold advantage. We were outfoxed again. Using those new rules, they rode a river of money such as Colorado had never seen– much of it from four billionaire ideologues – into their 2004 victories.

Leading those leftist mega-donors was Tim Gill, a gay activist and software tycoon. A long article about him in The Atlantic Monthly, March 2007, is must reading for anyone wanting to study how our Colorado experience could impact 49 other states. You can be sure the other side is making such a study; the DNC coming to Denver this summer proves it. How Gill himself sees the future is evident from his own words, quoted in the article’s title: “They Won’t Know What Hit Them.”

Have term limits, taking effect since 1998, cost Republicans a few seats each cycle as popular incumbents retired in demographically shifting districts? Yes. Are the state’s media generally friendlier to liberals than conservatives? Yes. Has migration from the coasts (and Mexico) moved Colorado from red toward blue? Yes again.

But does any of this excuse our sad disarray? I say no. I say the fault is in ourselves, not in our stars. We simply coasted too much. We had it easy and we took it easy – too easy. The price finally came due.

Political pendulum swings are as American as apple pie. We need them, human frailty on both right and left being what it is. The concern in Colorado is that we’re seeing a long-term sea change, not just a swing. Liberals are entrenching, settling in, while many conservatives remain disoriented and demoralized.

Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute (succeeding Tom Tancredo, who succeeded me), reels off the names of 50 organizations on the left in our state in as many seconds – a potent echo chamber of progressive propaganda, ostensibly untainted by partisanship or ideology. Many are funded by Tim Gill, our homegrown George Soros, eager to franchise nationally.

Caldara also laments the way conservatives were taken into camp by Bill Owens and other Republican leaders when times were good, similar to what occurred in Washington under Tom “Nowhere Else to Cut” DeLay and the current President. It made the right keep silent when we shouldn’t have. Far better, if one can adapt the old slogan, to let Reaganites be Reaganites: let the voices of principled protest ring out when politicians start to fold.

Electoral victories and incumbency for their own sake are a false mistress. We need a fixed, unvarying standard of what’s good policy. My state and yours should be constantly measured against the “conservative leading indicators” of (1) a constitutional government, (2) a market economy, and (3) a social order balancing liberty and duty – seeking a tone of common life that is (4) culturally cohesive and confident, (5) morally rigorous, and (6) religiously reverent. We should work untiringly for these objectives, and accept no substitutes.

The Scottish historian Alexander Tytler, a contemporary of Adam Smith and our own Founders, observed that nations attempting democracy pass through stages from bondage to faith to courage, then rising to liberty and abundance, then sinking to complacency, apathy, dependency, and finally back into bondage. It’s sobering to think where on that circle our country is today.

Within America’s larger story there are chapters repeating the same pattern. Colorado was undone, for the time being at least, by complacency and apathy. Now we see a dependency ethic taking over. Sobering indeed. The remedy? Conservatives state by state must stay hungry, stay on offense. “The natural progress of things,” as Thomas Jefferson warned, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Yet this is not inevitable, if we pay what he said is liberty’s price: eternal vigilance.

Walk in their shoes

(Townhall.com, Mar. 22) Imagine being told as a child: "You carry bad blood." Then imagine this stigma was placed on you by one side of your family, in reference to your heritage from the other side of the family. I honestly can't begin to imagine how that would have felt or what it would have done to me. But I think it would have marked me unforgettably. It would have stayed with me for a long time, even if I ultimately overcame it and went on to have a successful life and feel good about myself. Then try to imagine looking in the mirror as you're growing up, and having the whole society where you live send much the same message about your bloodlines and those of your relatives and everyone else who looks like you. I can't imagine that either. Even the effort to walk in those shoes gives me a stab of pain, the sense of a soul-deadening burden. These two scenarios describe, I believe without unfair exaggeration, the personal experience of Sen. Barack Obama and the collective experience of most black Americans for almost 400 years now. They've been on my mind since reading (not hearing) Obama's speech on race in American life, given March 18 in Philadelphia amid controversy over the Afrocentric, anti-American sermons of his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama didn't say his mother's mother told him in so many words that he carried bad blood. But that's the implication I take from his comments about the white grandmother's unthinking racial slurs and her expressed fear of black men. "That's me," the young boy might think. "That's my dad." Would it hurt? Would it stay with you? How could it not?

So I am not particularly offended, as many of my fellow conservatives have been, by Obama's mention of this experience in his speech. Rather I'm troubled by it. It stirs me. It takes me way out of my comfort zone, which is probably not a bad thing.

His implied equation of grandma's momentary private prejudices or bigotry with Rev. Wright's years of public rage and race-baiting does have a note of intellectual dishonesty that reflects poorly on the senator's fitness for the presidency. Yet that doesn't negate the object lesson we all have an opportunity to learn from this uncomfortable episode of the past week.

What we've seen and heard on the Trinity Church video clips -- the enthusiasm of the congregation, even more than the ranting of the pastor -- along with the constructive candor from Obama himself about seldom-discussed issues of resentment and stereotyping between blacks and whites, challenges us to walk in the shoes of African-Americans more empathetically than most of us (me for sure) may ever have done before.

And that again is probably not a bad thing, whatever you think of Barack's aspiration to the White House (I'm having none of it). What would be a bad thing is if we conservatives let this teachable moment slip away in a storm of self-righteous scolding toward the admittedly awful Jeremiah Wright and the admittedly confused folks who think he's on target.

People who are hurting tend to say hurtful things; anyone who's ever been in a bitter family or marital quarrel knows that. And you don't move toward reconciliation and healing in a toxic situation like that, merely by telling the other person (wrong as he may be) to grow up, get over it, stop being childish. You start by trying to understand, by walking in their shoes, and then slowly work back toward civil conversation with the emotional level dialed down. I can't see that it's any different in our multiracial American family of 300 million than in the blood families you and I belong to. Or is it? Tell me what I'm missing.

Let me repeat, just to be clear: Barack Obama is the wrong man to be President of the United States. Though brilliant and gifted, he is too far left, too inexperienced, and yes, too slippery and manipulative. All of those qualities, positive and negative, were evident this week in his speech on race. Michelle Obama is the wrong woman to be First Lady, and Jeremiah Wright is the wrong man to be visiting the Oval Office as spiritual advisor. Neither of them understands America well enough or, it would seem, loves her as she deserves -- warts and all.

But with that said, if these three fellow Americans of ours have provided the rest of us a chance to walk in the shoes of a long-suffering racial group that Lincoln warned would take centuries to knit back fully into our national family, it's too good a chance to miss. No matter what else comes out of the 2008 campaign, that could be one of this year's true blessings. Do as you choose, but I'll be damned if I'm passing it up.

Cross-posted on PoliticsWest.com

Be someone's Bill Buckley

(Denver Post, March 16) The famous political gadfly and New York literary lion is invited to speak at the University of Hawaii. He accepts, not for the fee or the beach time, but with a passion for his beliefs and a try-anything spirit that equally attracts him to sailing and the harpsichord. Two starstruck newlyweds, intellectually underfed at the Pearl Harbor naval base, come up after the lecture to shake their hero’s hand. He responds encouragingly to the young ensign’s aspiration for a career in conservatism. That night a life is changed. It was my life that took a turn under the Honolulu palms in 1968, and it was William F. Buckley Jr. who aided the turn in a single gracious moment of uncalculating kindness. Donna and I relived the memory on learning of Bill’s death – at the writing desk, with his boots on, aged 82 – two weeks ago.

Buckley’s legacy is towering. Founder of National Review, midwife to the Goldwater and Reagan candidacies, author of over 50 books and 5000 columns, host of “Firing Line” on PBS for 33 years, he was the conservative movement’s George Washington. But my tribute is not to his public persona. It is to the private man, unforgettable in his flair for friendship and his genius for generosity.

Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute told my radio listeners of contacting WFB cold for a high-school newspaper interview during a West Virginia speaking trip in the 1970s. Kesler got not only the scoop but a recommendation letter to Harvard, his first step to becoming one of America’s leading political scientists.

David Asman, formerly at the Wall Street Journal and now an anchor on Fox, ended his one-hour commemorative special by confiding, “I probably wouldn’t be in journalism if it weren’t for Bill Buckley.” His experience matched Kesler’s and mine: a young fan’s letter to WFB that brought a fatherly reply such as 99 of 100 big shots would never stoop to send.

You could fill a book with the stories of this contagiously energetic man’s influence on budding devotees of liberty, order, and American exceptionalism. Some of the beneficiaries rose to stardom themselves, others (like me) remained more obscure; but a lifelong bond of affection and gratitude linked all of us to Bill. And amazingly, he reciprocated.

As a kid on Nixon’s staff after the Navy, I found the sage of National Review never too busy when I called up hoping to write for the magazine (he assigned me to book editor George Will), or get advice during the Watergate scandal, or explore job leads after quitting in protest. As a think-tank guy in Colorado a decade later, I was floored to receive complimentary mention in Overdrive, his 1983 memoir.

WFB heads the list of important men who reached down and took an interest in me when there was nothing in it for them. Sen. Charles Percy, Missouri Gov. Warren Hearnes, and Gene Bradley of GE were others in the 1960s. In the ’70s there were John Ehrlichman and Bill Armstrong; in the ‘80s, Donald Rumsfeld and Chuck Stevinson. I try to pay it forward in their honor.

Gone are my fantasies of succeeding as the next Bill Buckley – or later the next George Roche, my mentor at Hillsdale College. I just seek opportunities to “be someone’s Bill Buckley,” in the sense of taking time to encourage that eager, questing youngster as he long ago encouraged me. Winning a million in the lottery is nothing compared to the rewards of this.

We who follow Christ, as Buckley so devoutly did, call the recent season Lent and the coming days Holy Week. Self-giving is the keynote. The Good Samaritan, helping where he didn’t have to, is the example. God-talk speaks far less than actions. WFB’s life shouted and sang.