Has GOP come undone?

(Denver Post, Oct. 10) “Not so fast,” warns the movie hero. He’ll make sure the cad or the con man doesn’t get away with it. One side in American politics has always been the party of “not so fast,” putting the brakes on expansive government power. Today that’s the Republican Party, and they serve the common good in doing it, even when unsuccessful. But I’m concerned that in the governor’s race this year, Colorado Republicans may be so unsuccessful that their restraining influence on political overreach is lost for a long time. Even the most fervent Democrats, if they remember the corruption of power, shouldn’t relish that prospect – though one can see why they’re keeping gleefully silent as Tom Tancredo and Dan Maes rip each other. Voting begins this week. The worry du jour last week was demotion of the GOP to minor-party status if Maes finishes under 10 percent. I don’t think he will, but he obviously won’t win either. In the likely outcome of Democrat John Hickenlooper winning, or the unlikely outcome of the freelancer Tancredo prevailing, the one certainty on Nov. 3 is a defeated, divided, and demoralized Republican establishment – which doesn’t augur well for constitutionalism.

What’s constitutionalism, and who cares? We all should. Our written constitution of self-government, in this state or the United States, is only as strong as the unwritten traditions of fair competition and civic virtue – habits of the heart, as they have been called – that sustain America as a caring community of free people. A jungle ethos of winning at any cost endangers all that. Let's not go there..

Too many on the right in Colorado, I’m sorry to say, already have. To be clear: While this party stalwart is firmly on record as supporting neither Maes nor Tancredo nor Hickenlooper, I have GOP friends in each man’s camp – and our friendship will survive the disagreement. The purpose here is to analyze attitudes, not to slam personalities. The slamming is what has to stop.

Reversing early assurances that he wouldn’t run an anti-Maes campaign, Tom has. On Dan’s side, a frothing anti-Tancredo screed is now online, slinging slurs like “chicken hawk.” It’s more bitter than a primary because there’s no intra-party comity to damp the invective. Tom says he’ll govern as a Republican if elected -- but it wasn’t long ago he emphatically disavowed the party label, and mocked Lincoln for good measure.

Political memories aren’t short. Even if Ken Buck wins, some congressional seats flip, and Democrats suffer legislative losses, a self-wounded GOP will be disadvantaged under the gold dome after this cannibalistic governor’s race. As tax pressures intensify and Obama girds for reelection, Colorado is going to need a party of “not so fast.” Who will it be? The American Constitution Party can’t mount a defense when liberals go on offense.

Whether Tancredo’s ambition succeeds this time, or fizzles as it did in the presidential primaries, many in my party will need to think long and hard about whether the end justifies the means. Maes’s undeniable weaknesses were but a relative excuse, not an absolute justification, for mass desertion of the Republican nominee. Somehow the McInnis disease, scorning party standard-bearers in 2006 and 2008, went epidemic in 2010.

Abandoning long-established institutions for “light and transient causes” violates conservative prudence, the Declaration of Independence warns. Many of the GOP’s finest, including four of Tom’s congressional colleagues, have gambled unconservatively this fall.

They used to say the Episcopal Church was the Republican regulars at prayer. The Tancredo movement seems like the regulars on a fling. Might all this, in hindsight, prove an overreaction? Have we destroyed the village to save it? “She’s come undone,” sang the Guess Who. I hope I’m wrong in applying that to our state’s Grand Old Party.

Wanted: Congressmen who listen

(Denver Post, Sept. 19) “It is essential to liberty,” wrote Madison in Federalist No. 52, “that the government should have a common interest with the people; an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with the people.” And what did he say is the only way to secure that? “Frequent elections, unquestionably.” We saw a perfect example of Madison’s point, and a beautiful thing it was, the other day when Sen. Michael Bennet and Reps. Betsy Markey and John Salazar, Democrats all, dived off the Obama bandwagon on his ill-conceived $50 billion Son of Stimulus plan to limit damage in the upcoming midterms. The president’s erstwhile congressional allies Colorado obviously see the plan as a source of damage. Even before the voters speak through their ballots in November, they’ve begun to murmur through townhalls and polls in September – and Markey, Salazar, and Bennet, big stimulus fans last year, are now all ears. “Immediate dependence on the people” strikes again. The system works (sort of).

We’d really know the system was working if Democratic Reps. Ed Perlmutter, Jared Polis, and Diana DeGette also expressed sudden distaste for the dangerous deficit and the obscenity of uncontrolled spending. It won’t happen with Polis and DeGette because they’re comfy in safe districts, cruising (they believe) toward another term. It still might happen with Perlmutter, who is polling dead even with GOP challenger Ryan Frazier; but as yet the suburbanite must feel less threatened by the Republican tide than his rural colleagues Markey out east and Salazar out west.

I’m acquainted with some libertarians and curmudgeons (often the same thing) who growl, “Don’t vote, it only encourages the SOB’s.” The present case refutes that attitude. Were it not for Cory Gardner running to oust Betsy Markey, Scott Tipton surging in his rematch with John Salazar, and Ken Buck putting the fear in Michael Bennet, with millions of voters at the ready, the Dems could continue supporting Obama’s leftist agenda to their hearts’ content.

Seems to me that more voting, not less, is what the doctor ordered for America right now. From Brown in Massachusetts to O’Donnell in Delaware, each week’s by-elections and primaries in 2010 have brought proof that we the people are wide awake, marshalling our votes to either make senators and representatives listen or replace them with unknown upstarts who will.

Thus the “emergency situation” for Diana DeGette this fall might turn out to be not a judge’s ban on tax dollars for destroying human embryos, about which she was fulminating on Tuesday, but an ER doctor’s candidacy to ban her and help repeal Obamacare. Is Republican Mike Fallon a longshot in Democratic Denver? Yes. Is DeGette a lock? No – not in this year of the Tea Party and Beck’s half-million on the Mall.

Election night won’t just see a massive wipeout of vulnerable House Democrats, predicts Karl Rove. It will also bring the upset of several congressmen whom no one thought vulnerable at all. Even Boulder’s Jared Polis, the epitome of urban cool and made of money, may not be out of reach for veteran, businessman, and family man Stephen Bailey, the GOP nominee in CD-2. Our won’t-listen Congress has stirred an anything’s-possible backlash.

The CD-7 seat that Perlmutter holds was expressly drawn for him by a friendly judge when Ed and I were state senators in 2002. How ironic if Frazier were to sweep him out of it now, just when demographics were supposed to be making the district loss-proof.

Which reminds me, Colorado has a won’t-listen Democratic legislature that may likewise go Republican in one or both houses on Nov. 2. My party is bent on that, with Hickenlooper leading for governor and redistricting coming up. As Madison also knew, maps matter mightily.

Eat healthy this election

(Denver Post, Sept. 5) “McInnis: A Jobs Governor,” say the bus benches and billboards that were to give the former GOP congressman a lift toward November after he won in August; only he lost. Still you see the slogan everywhere, as sad as a Christmas tree in spring, a reminder of how strange politics can be. Meanwhile the finalists for senator forge into fall with their own bizarre blemishes left over from summer – Democrat Michael Bennet alleged to have been a corporate looter, Republican Ken Buck scolded for joking that “I don’t wear high heels.” Has declining to cross-dress ever before been deemed politically insensitive? If such malefactors at the top of both tickets weren’t enough to make nonvoters of us all, my fellow Republicans have the opportunity to lose sleep over the shockingly moderate coloration of Tambor Williams, Maes’ designee for lieutenant governor. Becoming Light Guv is usually a disappearance sufficient to one’s face on a milk carton. But suddenly Ms. Williams, unlikely ever to take office and powerless if she did, was held up as my party’s bogeywoman of the center, sinister as Hillary Clinton. Come on.

Overall, it’s painfully evident that in 2010, even more than in most election years, few of us are going to get what we want. But can we at least get, as the self-help guru Mick Jagger once promised, what we need? I think so.

Suppose the campaign was a supermarket. You could breeze in for a Lotto ticket, a six-pack, and a gossip magazine – resulting tomorrow in the lottery not paying off, a hangover, and Brangelina as remote as before. This is the dreamy wish-fulfillment approach to elections that too many Americans, left and right, indulge in. Embarrassingly juvenile, really.

As grownups, though, you and I know better. We’re going to the store with a list, smart shoppers ready to turn last week’s earnings into next week’s eating. We’ll go easy on the junk food, heavy on the healthy stuff, and if the menu in coming days isn’t quite the banquet of our dreams, at least we’ve kept our self-reliance and our self-respect. We’re not chumps for anyone’s ad pitch.

Election Day will bring less frustration and more satisfaction (apologies to the Rolling Stones again), no matter where you’re located on the political spectrum, if you use Labor Day to make up your campaign shopping list in this fashion. The eight intervening weeks will also be less of an ordeal, because you’ll have a calm, cool sense of seeing through all the flimflam.

The aisles to avoid are the ones with entitlements, benefit goodies, borrowing from our kids, laws that play favorites, victimhood, appeasing aggressor, inflammatory wedge issues, hero-worship of my guys, demonizing the other guys, future scenarios with utopian fantasies or dystopian horrors. That stuff is junk no matter which party peddles it, and both sometimes do. It will only make a sick body politic sicker. Don’t even feed it to your dog.

Seeing through the flimflam isn’t the same as preventing it, of course. Some candidates and ballot issues perpetrating the above will win. Some opposed to it will lose. But your shopping list is good into 2011 and beyond, as a guide for holding all those darned politicians accountable. Do it!

And if your list includes the healthy restraints of divided government in Denver as well as Washington; the rebirth of competing media voices in our state; some soul-searching by Colorado Republicans and Democrats alike, after a sloppy show this year; a state Supreme Court chastened by voter vigilance; and a return to reality-based politics following the Obama euphoria of 2008 – well then, I can practically guarantee you a delicious, nutritious midnight supper on Nov. 2.

This Republican is staying

(Denver Post, Aug. 15) “I don’t know what the future holds,” my biblically-minded friends will say, “but I know Who holds the future.” Thus grounded, they’re able to be calm, courageous, confident, and cheerful in the face of adversity. Amidst a Republican base disheartened over the struggle to pick our nominee for governor, I am of good courage for a similar reason – political rather than theological. Even though I don’t know who will stand for my party this fall, I know what my party stands for. So division or defeatism is not an option for me over the next 11 weeks. Former state Sen. Cliff Dodge resigning as president of the Arapahoe Republican Men’s Club in order to join Tom Tancredo’s third-party bid, the morning after primary voters nominated Dan Maes, wasn’t quite Robert E. Lee choosing gray over blue – but it dramatized the deep fracture in GOP ranks. The kind of year we’re having, Maes and Tancredo may both be out of the race by the time you read this; no matter.

Each is a good man, neither is the next Lincoln, and the point here is bigger than either of them. Simply put, our state needs a unified Republican party to anchor the center-right. Sustaining the vitality and viability of this “grand old” institution of self-government in Colorado, 150 years and counting, is more important than winning any one election for any one office. Far more.

Shattering the state’s only vehicle for conservative governance in a petty power struggle, a summer fit of petulance, pique, and panic – and handing a plurality win to liberal John Hickenlooper as liberal Bill Ritter’s successor, at a time when liberalism is ever more discredited – would be an act of self-destructive folly with few parallels in modern history. My fellow Republicans shouldn’t do it, though many are tempted.

Not me, because I know what my party stands for. To say this is to assert two things. One is about principles. Republicans stand for individual liberty, personal responsibility, economic freedom, limited government, strong defense, traditional morality, recognition of human imperfectibility, and the understanding of rights as God-given, not manmade.

The other assertion is about process. My party stands (as in fact do our opponents, the Democrats) for the proven superiority of two well-established and diversified competitors vying for the consent of the governed, in preference to three or 23 splintered rivals, evanescent and narrow in the European style. Breakaway factions have occasional value if driven by issues; but the current Chicken Little outcry of “not electable,” opportunistically roosting on the Constitution ticket, hardly qualifies.

I voted for rookie-of-the-year Dan Maes in the primary. Barring the unforeseen, you can expect I’ll be for him again in November. He may not win; but nobody expected him to get this far. As noted here on August 1, Maes for Governor 2010 has echoes of Andrews for Governor 1990, another darkhorse nominee. Though I lost that year, the GOP began a decade and a half of dominance – which never could have occurred if someone like, say, Ted Strickland had gone third-party against me and toppled the temple.

Conservatives conserve. We’re the sensible ant to the liberals’ impulsive grasshopper. We don’t eat the seed corn. We don’t burn the house down for firewood. We don’t trash time-tested institutions for transitory whims, as too many Colorado Republicans now seem inclined to do. Think twice, compadres. Stop before it’s too late. Wake up.

Conservatives know, as Thomas Ferril’s poem in the Capitol rotunda has it, that “today is going to be long, long ago.” A single executive term is nothing – a robust and durable two-party system in this state, everything by comparison. Gov. Hickenlooper or no, my Republican devotion is immovable. My faith in Colorado self-government, unsinkable.

Maes and the medicine

(Denver Post, Aug. 1) The other day in Starbucks I overheard Reagana, a personal trainer and Tea Party mom, debating with McDole, her CPA and a moderate Republican. “You can still support McInnis after everything we know about him? With Colorado on the brink, you’re telling me he’s the governor we need?” Doggedly but without enthusiasm, McDole pointed out the GOP veteran’s experience as a legislator and congressman, his litany of endorsements, his feisty campaign style and fundraising prowess. As for plagiarism, heck, Joe Biden did it, Dr. King did it, and look where they are. Passing off that judge’s writing as his own – no big deal. But Reagana said it came down to trust. Scott McInnis took $300,000 from a Muslim foundation for this glorified term paper. It looked to her like sharia sympathizers buying influence with a politician. Poor judgment for starters, and now with the stolen intellectual property, weak integrity as well. “He’s lost my vote.”

The CPA shrugged. His ballot was in the mail already, marked for McInnis. He figured if polling found Scott too damaged by press attacks, the Republican power-brokers would maneuver him off the ticket after the primary and put in Ken Buck or Jane Norton, whichever lost the Senate race. Besides, scoffed McDole, we can’t nominate Dan Maes – no one ever heard of him.

No one but a majority of GOP delegates, the trainer jabbed. Maes defeated Mac at the state assembly after a year of campaigning. How arrogant for the media and party insiders to talk as if no private citizen dares aspire to statewide office. Tell it to the late Gov. John Love. Bayh of Indiana and Blunt of Missouri, legacy boys barely 30, won governor with no credentials but daddy’s name. Businessman Maes has the tools and the ideas, argued Reagana, and anyway Colorado NEEDS an outsider.

McDole fretted about a letter from some Longmont woman in the July 18 Denver Post. “Maes wants to protect TABOR, buck the unions, thin the state payroll, encourage oil and gas exploration, and pass an Arizona-style immigration law. She has it all on tape.”

Reagana clapped with delight. Saw the letter, loved the letter, what’s not to like? Even if Scott could beat Hickenlooper, which he can’t (but neither will he quit the ticket), do you think for a minute he would do all those things, as wired into the cautious establishment as he is?

Our state needs a new broom to sweep clean, she said, because we really are at the brink. California may soon be in for the kind of bailout Greece got, and other states will follow. We’re not on the short list, but we’re not healthy either – huge annual deficits despite the Referendum C tax hike, and a time bomb in the state pension fund. Protecting TABOR is a must. So is cutting taxes.

The CPA jumped to his feet in exasperation. Was there going to be a scene? I looked away and pretended not to listen. “Don’t tell me you’re for those three awful ballot issues, 60, 61, and 101? Wiping out jobs, paralyzing services – please!”

Yes, said the trainer, because with so many governments headed for a fiscal coronary, this is heart-attack medicine we better swallow. One reaffirms the ban on state debt, part of Colorado’s constitution since 1876. Another rolls back Ritter’s illegal property tax increase. The third takes about 2 percent off government’s annual growth rate. Foolhardy NOT to pass them.

“Maes and the medicine – that’s where you come down?” McDole was incredulous. He had forgotten my long-ago campaign for governor, asking voters to support Andrews and the amendments. Roy Romer won easily, but the passage of term limits in 1990 and TABOR in 1992 has benefited our state ever since. As for 2010, who can say?