Centennial Institute launched

(Lakewood, Feb. 3) Former Colorado Senate President John Andrews has been appointed Director of The Centennial Institute, a new think tank being created by Colorado Christian University, CCU President Bill Armstrong announced today. The new entity will work to enhance public understanding of the most important issues relating to “faith, family and freedom,” he explained. The institute will be funded from private contributions, separately from the university’s regular operating budget. The Centennial Institute will conduct research, analyze public policy options, sponsor seminars and conferences and other activities involving students, faculty, staff and outside experts. “We are greatly complimented to have John Andrews joining CCU. He is a nationally recognized public intellectual whose ideas are impacting the thought-life of Colorado and the Nation,” President Armstrong explained.

“I am honored to be part of Colorado Christian University,” Senator Andrews said. “Like CCU, I am committed to defending the permanent things – the timeless political principles of the American founding, together with the moral and spiritual truths of our Judeo-Christian heritage.”

Senator Andrews, who now writes a column for the Denver Post and hosts a weekly radio program on KNUS (710), was a state senator from 1998 to 2005, serving until term limited under the Colorado constitution. First as Minority Leader and then as Senate President, he earned national recognition from the American Legislative Exchange Council which recognized him as National Legislator of the Year. His tireless efforts to protect American families earned praise from the Rocky Mountain Family Council while the Colorado Union of Taxpayers saluted him for exceptional efforts to prevent state tax increases.

Among his legislative achievements were bills cutting the Colorado capital gains tax, providing toll lanes to curb traffic congestion, outlining a statewide water policy and the School Sunshine Act and Colorado’s Defense of Marriage Act. He also played an important role in legislation to establish education vouchers, tort reform, expanding charter schools and requiring parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion.

Senator Andrews was the founder of the State’s foremost conservative think tank, The Independence Institute and was its president from 1985 – 1993.

John was born in Michigan and grew up in the Colorado Mountains. He served as a U.S. Navy submarine officer after graduating from Principia College in 1966. John and his wife Donna have three grown children and a grandson, all living in the Denver area. Senator and Mrs. Andrews are members of Greenwood Community Church.

Manual shows up the bureaucrats

There is lots of demand these days for government to “create” results. But policies pandering to that are misguided. Whether it's jobs, health care, or even successful schools, the idea that people in government, no matter how talented, well-meaning, and well-funded can create sound, sustainable, scalable improvement in the lives of Americans has been proven wrong time and time again. Our government’s attempt to “create” financial security for seniors instead created a Social Security system racing towards bankruptcy. A sustained attempt to “create” widespread homeownership – a bipartisan folly to be sure – instead destroyed the world’s greatest financial institutions. And, public school systems – an attempt to “create” a well-educated public – is a national catastrophe and disgrace, depriving particularly our most disadvantaged children of the opportunities everyone deserves.

That government policies and programs cannot create these things on their own should not be discouraging. Americans can have them, but they must be created through the initiative, motivation, and ingenuity of Americans themselves. What government policy can and should do is remove barriers to success created by government itself – establishing an environment where progress, rather than frustration, is a natural result.

This morning I visited Manual High School in Denver. Manual is an inner-city high school serving a challenged community – more than 80% of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Nearly the entire student body is composed of minority children. In 2006, the school was closed for chronic failure – only 15% of students were proficient in reading. The school reopened in 2007 under an “autonomy” arrangement that provided new principal Rob Stein with relief from a handful of union and district rules including those regarding school schedules, hiring processes, and teacher compensation. Also, the school board reached an agreement with Stein to permit him to make key budgeting decisions at the school level rather than at the district level.

Stein describes himself as a “culture guy,” and he took advantage of the unusual autonomy to assemble a highly motivated staff and create a school culture of accountability and professionalism. At a twice-weekly school-wide meeting, the school-polo-shirt clad kids hear colleagues who’ve excelled or contributed in the past week receive ”shout-out” recognition (in one case accompanied by a $5 Burger King gift card); and at the same meeting noting that all seventy-one students who had been tardy during the week were required to attend detention that Friday evening. During “advisory,” small group classes meeting three times per week, the students follow a curriculum of social and life skills (e.g., constructive ways to deal with confrontation) – many of which kids from more privileged backgrounds may learn from their parents.

Today, Manual is tied for fourth-best-performing non-charter high school in the Denver Public Schools. It’s easy to imagine a well-intentioned “reformer” drawing the wrong conclusions from the Manual experience. “Let’s require shout-outs and logo polo shirts in all of the schools,” they might say, “and we can improve like Manual.” That would, of course, be missing the point. The terrific progress at Manual was not born of the particular tactics Stein employs, but of the autonomy that has permitted Stein and his dedicated team to implement their own innovative approach to serving the unique needs of children in Manual’s community.

By freeing the Manual team of district and union red tape, the autonomy agreements did not create success – that’s not possible to do from headquarters – but created the circumstances where success could flourish on its own. Freedom to succeed – that’s what American’s need in this challenging time.

C'est le change, Obama-style

Today's lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye this morning, reminding me of a famous French proverb that should be kept close at hand over the next four years: "Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose". Translated: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." It sure didn't take long for Barack Obama to answer one of the compelling questions that I repeatedly raised during his campaign: will he be the "post-partisan" candidate that he promised to be? Or will he be the highly partisan politician he proved himself to be in the United States Senate?

The answer to this has come early in week #2 of his term, when he decided to ram the economic stimulus through the House of Representatives on purely partisan lines -- bowing to Nancy Pelosi in the process. As the Journal reports:

Barack Obama promised to end the "politics of division," unite Washington's factions and overcome partisanship. And what do you know -- so far he has: The President's stimulus plan generated bipartisan House opposition, with every Republican and 11 Democrats voting against it on Wednesday. It passed 244-188. The political class is feigning shock that Mr. Obama's stylistic olive branches to the GOP -- cocktail hour at the White House, cutting a line item for shrubbery on the National Mall -- failed to peel off even a single vote across the aisle. The chatter is that Republicans were taking a great political risk to oppose a President with 70%-plus approval ratings on his first piece of legislation. But the real risk here is to Mr. Obama, and it isn't from Republicans. It's from his fellow Democrats. Given the miserable economy and the Beltway's neo-Keynesian policy consensus, a true compromise would have gathered overwhelming support. But rather than use Mr. Obama's political capital to craft such a deal, the White House abdicated to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. House Democrats proceeded to ignore all GOP suggestions as they wrote the bill, shedding tax cuts while piling on spending for every imaginable interest group. The bipartisan opposition reflects how much the Pelosi bill became a vehicle for partisan social policy rather than economic stimulus.

Genuine bipartisanship means compromises on policy, not photo-ops and hand shakes. The last two Democratic Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, also came to power with big Democratic majorities in Congress, veered far to the left on policy, and quickly came undone. To adapt White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now famous line, a 70% approval rating is a terrible thing to waste on the ideas of Henry Waxman and Pete Stark.

One of my biggest fears about Barack Obama was that he would not be strong enough to stand up to the far-left partisans of his own party, and would be bullied into following the ideologues into a standard liberal abyss -- filled with the kind of redistributive social policies that brought us the Great Society and other expansive social progams. Given the unprecedented recent expansion of the government into our economy, with tax payers spending trillions on bail-outs and flame-outs, the hope was the Obama would be able to put pragmatism over politics on managing the public's interest. So much for "hope" and "change".

Of course, "change" was always an ill-defined bromide, capable of allowing the Obama campaign to create a narrative that had almost nothing of substance underneath it. It was the perfect vessel for this candidate, who gave people hope without telling them what specifically he was going to do to make such lofty ideas and goals a reality. And now we know that for all the rhetoric, the reality is something we've seen before: old style partisan politics with big government aspirations.

Change we can believe in, mon ami.

A Limbaugh listener fires back

Editor: A day after Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-GA, took Obama's bait and went after radio host Rush Limbaugh this week, he ate his words. The damage was done, however. Americans saw Republicans and conservatives sniping at each other when we should be focused on stopping the Democrats' runaway train of statism. Here is the story on Gingrey's initial, soon-retracted criticism of Rush. And below is an open letter from our regular contributor Red at Heart, a grandmother in Colorado Springs, taking him to task. Dear Congressman Gingrey:

As one of the 20 million-plus listeners of the Rush Limbaugh radio program, I am writing to comment about your remarks made with respect to Mr. Limbaugh.

First of all, the listening audience of Rush is a highly ignored constituency in this country. We lined up in support of G.W. Bush, and stood by while the Left vilified a decent man. We did not always agree with him, especially the fact that he forgot his veto pen when he moved into the Oval Office. We have not taken to the streets to protest Mr. Obama's election or the voter fraud that may have well put him in office. We have stood by silently and watched the most expensive inauguration in American history take place while the rest of the country strains under a recessive period, and not one Congressman spoke out against the waste. We stood by silently while the minister giving his benediction made comments meant to further divide our country along racial lines, and not one member of Congress spoke out to rebuke it. We watched folks in office, like you, sit idly by during the campaign and not make noise about questionable campaign contributions, voter registration irregularities, questionable associations with persons that normally would not fit our template of what we want to see in our president, or the fact that Mr. Obama was never pressed to release typical and expected documents prior to the election. We did not hear one Congressman in front of a national TV microphone exposing Obama's votes in Illinois on late term abortion. Many of his supporters in Nov. did not even know his position on abortion. Why? Because elected officials that have a duty to tell the truth failed to do so. We do not have the microphone on the floor of the House or Senate. We send people there to do that job for us. When we see failure to speak out on our behalf, we turn to other sources with the courage, leadership and voice to do it for us.

The 20 million-plus Americans that follow and support Rush Limbaugh are tired of weak politicians that bow at the feet of the media. We are tired of the media and pundits setting our policy in this country and we are tired of having no place to go for truth and a refresher course in common sense, ethics, and adherence to the Constitution. Our moral fabric of this country is shredding, politicians such as Pelosi and Reid, rule the day without regard. Had it not been for Mr. Limbaugh and others like him, Pelosi's plan to stimulate the economy by abortion and birth control would have gone unnoticed. It was only after the 'right wing extremists' on talk radio fired up the base that it became a well known issue and was quickly extinguished. Moderate and centrist Republicans are losing elections to right-leaning Democrats. The writing is in the wall, yet the realization of what we need to do to win elections goes by the wayside.

As a physician, the Republicans in this country would like to see you and others with the expertise and knowledge to start talking about healthcare reform and how it should be shaped around conservative values and the free market. There is work to be done to speak in a clear and loud voice. Pandering and trying to 'get along' with those that have no tolerance for the other side of the aisle has lost us elections and majorities in '06 and '08. If we don’t have leadership to stand up and take these issues on, we lose again in '10 and '12. There is a critical poverty in this country when it comes to lack of truth and getting information out to the public.

Please refrain from attacking private citizens. Yes, the average person does not know what your job is like or what you must do in order to get through the day as a U.S. Congressman. We do, however, understand that we are sick and tired with weakness, giving in to policies that continue to weaken and diminish our economy and our standing in the world. We are tired of the media and foreign campaign donations shaping our policy, driving our elections and determining our course. Your comments about Rush Limbaugh have given fuel to the Democrat fire to get him off the air. Free speech will die in this country, thanks to bias, lies and fear.

Just as Mr. Obama is making a media blitz to try and convince the country that he truly wishes a bipartisan approach to his stimulus, he is also slyly setting the stage for removing dissenting voices such as Mr. Limbaugh from public airwaves. The stimulus bill could have already been voted on and passed due to Democrat majority. Mr. Obama plans to hang any failure it may have around the necks of Republicans that vote with him.

Sometimes being on the outside and looking in provides us with a clear picture. We watch what happens day to day in Washington. We see political posturing, gross over-spending, waste and negligence. We have a voice or two in this great nation that have a platform to speak out against this, and the Washington mindset is to silence those voices.

Why do we not hear politicians speaking out against other dissenting voices such as Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, John Stewart, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Bill Mayer and a host of others that hate Republicans, despise conservatism and will go to any lengths to push their liberal agenda? Why are you, and others in Congress, that are getting a bit uncomfortable with Rush Limbaugh's comments, also framing your discussion around boisterous, outspoken rhetoric coming from the other side?

We have a local talk show here in Colorado Springs and day after day, average citizens call in to say, "I want my country back." If Rush Limbaugh did not have a message that speaks to the heart and minds of millions upon millions of Americans, the market would not be there for him to speak. Let freedom ring, please.

Actions show who really cares in US

Mr. Obama encouraged us to all be part of making America better. I can get behind that because I am a compassionate conservative, and that’s what we do. Liberal-minded Arthur Brooks, in his 2006 book Who Really Cares, documents that conservatives, from sea to shining sea, give more than liberals in volunteer time and charitable contributions. Here is a review of the book.

Mr. Brooks begins by “discussing and dismissing the implicit notion that you are ‘more or less compassionate simply because [you] support taxing wealthy people’ or are ‘dissatisfied with the adequacy of government social programs’.”

He then draws his conclusion from 10 data sets, making four main points:

1 - The four forces in American life primarily responsible for making people charitable are “religion, skepticism about the government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepreneurism”.

2 - Conservative principles are most congenial to the four forces of charity.

3 - Liberals, who often claim to care more about others than conservatives do, are personally less charitable.

4 - Policies that displace (crowd out) personal charity are harmful to the nation because charity is good for the giver.

The next time someone wants to demonize or criticize a conservative, remember these facts about compassionate conservatism and helping others.

So yes Mr. President, I will support you by continuing to offer my time and resources to help others.