Lamborn's rivals & Reagan's example

"As the last journey of this faithful pilgrim [has taken] him beyond the sunset... we here still move in twilight, but we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had: we have his example.” So said Margaret Thatcher in eulogizing the 40th president in June 2004. But three short years later, his example clearly matters less to some Republicans than others; and to most Democrats, not at all. The response in political circles to a coherent and specific apologia for courageous and wise Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CD5) against his critics among Colorado’s chattering classes might have been predicted.

If what I claimed last week in Lamborn’s defense about the natural tendency of loquacious politicos – that, with a few noble exceptions, they tend to forget the meaning of words like virtue, honor, courage, and wisdom in favor of the who-whom of the cocktail party circuit and the respectable middle-of-the-road opinion editorial – then a clear defense of Reaganite conservatism and men like Mr. Lamborn who stand unapologetically for it is likely to draw a strong reaction.

Cara DeGette (linked above) and others on the left who love to observe and magnify any division within the GOP, and who love nothing better than to see any Reaganite tarred and feathered by his own party, can be expected to phone GOP opponents of Mr. Lamborn and ask them what they think of such mud-slinging? And – outrage of outrages – when the county GOP leadership had so recently issued a call for peace!

Mr. Lamborn’s opponents can be expected to respond as they did in 2006: “Alas, these are the kinds of tactics we were talking about.”

If the incumbent were not such a man as Mr. Lamborn, if he were one who could be expected to produce the respectable middle-of-the-road op-ed with more frequency, party leadership could have been counted on to have taken a clear stand in defense of the incumbent. After all, primaries are messy and energy-sapping and divisive. Why challenge a sitting Republican when there are so many Democrats to focus on? How much more Republicans could accomplish if we would only stop bickering and unite!

When the incumbent, however, is a Reaganite conservative, primaries take a miraculous turn: they either become healthy, party-building affairs, as then-chairman of the state GOP Ted Halaby confidently stated in 2004 when the state hierarchy and then-Gov. Bill Owens united to betray then-candidate and conservative hero Bob Schaffer by backing the moderate and respectable Pete Coors in a primary against him. Or, as now-Chairman of the state GOP Dick Wadhams has said of the impending Fifth District contest between Mr. Crank and Mr. Lamborn, primaries are merely a “family squabble” that do not cause us much concern up here in Denver.

El Paso GOP officials, when confronted with hearty and true defenses of Lamborn throughout this coming campaign season, will be faced with a choice: follow the earnest chattering crowd, presume against Mr. Lamborn and his supporters, and promise to investigate their mudslinging, with nary a word about any attention to the regular and visceral stream of mud that has come from GOP ranks for over a year against their own Republican incumbent.

Or, alternatively, recognize that what lies at the root of intra-party disputes is not just competing personalities and ambitions, but a clash between a political philosophy that believes truth and virtue are worth contending for, even when they are unpopular, and a philosophy that believes what the chattering classes judge to be likeability, electability, and respectability is the only just arbiter of campaign justice and electoral rewards.

What is so pernicious about the latter anti-philosophy is that it makes truth a tool to be wielded rather than a standard to be followed – something to be shaped, molded, interpreted to fit the story we want to tell and the candidate we want to win rather than something to shape, mold, and interpret the story we ought to tell and decide the candidate who ought to win. In the end, when this philosophy has been lived for any length of time, others telling the plain and simple truth becomes a “tactic”; virtue becomes a vice; wisdom becomes an error; and a hero becomes an outright villain.

Where this kind of confusion prevails, every faithful pilgrim must protest, but none should despair. All the greatest in our midst have borne this cross, and we have what they never had: their example to guide and inspire us now and forward.

Crank-Lamborn rematch bodes ill

As Whittaker Chambers wrote: “Since my desire is to live, I must live as far as possible outside the vapors of the perishing West even to the point of living as differently as possible from it. For, to survive at all, one must stand against it in its corruption (in this my instinct was never wrong and has never changed) even though one is not at war with it, is even committed to its defense. Actually, and with the profoundest vindictiveness of unhealth, it does not wish to be defended; it deeply resents anyone who would defend it and will seek to destroy him.” (Cold Friday, 1952) With Jeff Crank’s formal announcement that he will challenge Congressman Doug Lamborn (CO-5) in a GOP congressional primary in 2008, we have confirmation of what had been widely suspected: Mr. Crank *really* wants to be a congressman.

The fact that Mr. Lamborn stands for all the conservative principles to which Mr. Crank adheres, and has championed them for much longer and, if we’re being honest, with more vigor than Mr. Crank has, is no matter. We El Paso conservatives will therefore be treated against our wills to a replay of the 2006 primary, with the Crank camp accusing Mr. Lamborn of having distorted Mr. Crank’s record the first time around, thus having obtained his office illicitly, and thus having deserved Mr. Crank’s 2008 challenge.

The same people who will support Mr. Crank in this endeavor have in the past and will again, as a simple political reflex, offer up the normal “Party unity!” platitudes should Mr. Crank be victorious and anyone challenge him in a future primary.

Beyond this element of hypocrisy, what is so tedious about the “He lied about me” accusation of Lamborn is that it is itself illicit, and plainly so. Neither Mr. Lamborn, nor the Christian Coalition, nor the Club for Growth, nor anyone else who researched for themselves the relevant history, distorted Mr. Crank’s record. They publicized and documented Mr. Crank’s record, including his support while Vice President at the Chamber of Commerce for a City Council candidate who openly supported the homosexual movement, and Mr. Crank’s pragmatic opposition to a grassroots attempt to cut taxes.

Both episodes were, admittedly, liabilities to Mr. Crank in the 2006 primary. This is only the most obvious reason why he should not have taken the positions he took. A less obvious but more meaningful reason is that these positions were and still are contrary to the conservative principles Mr. Crank professes. It was not wrong in 2006 to point this out, and it will not be wrong in 2008 to point this out.

Yet this plain fact will remain forever obscure to many El Paso Republicans who are blinded both by their lack of understanding of conservative politics and by their involvement in the Party. I mean their regular involvement in Republican functions, whether Lincoln Day dinners or committee meetings at headquarters or friendship with GOP office-holders or just the rampant and vicious gossip that circulates in any county party – where the common coin is not, “What is true and right, and how do we get a victory for it?”, but instead, “Who is running for what, and who said what to whom, and how do we increase our popularity?” – this has made them forget the reason they got involved in the Party in the first place.

It has replaced their original, innocent love for what is true and right (commonly called “conservatism,” in useful contrast to “liberalism,” which is more accurately understood as what is not true and not right, even when it wears Republican dress) with a love for party titles and for status in party social circles.

The former line of thought and conversation builds character in both the individual and the Party. The latter line of thought and conversation has its origins in high schools across the nation and is destructive both to good judgment between men and to Party strength on behalf of the Good.

This is, alas, the origin of the well-documented conflict between Party Insiders and the party grassroots that is and will remain at the root of the Lamborn-Crank contest and every contest like it. It is a common joke among grassroots conservative activists that, once elected to office, it’s only a matter of time before a once-faithful conservative becomes a Party Insider and, by definition, useless for anything worth being useful for – like, say, actually advancing the conservative agenda in public policy.

Sometimes office-holders will stray obviously, as with the recent publicity surrounding a GOP member of the U.S. Senate – a family-values kind of guy – caught associating with a DC prostitution ring, and not for their campaign donations. More often, a GOP’er who gets elected to office strays more subtly, in a way only his family, closest friends, or staff would ever notice. He strays by becoming too attached to the office and its perks, making him reluctant to do anything he views as threatening his ability to hold onto that office.

The same dynamic works on Party Insiders of all stripes, whether they hold some office in the county party or just like being invited to GOP cocktail parties and soirees at the Governor’s Mansion: I don’t want to be viewed as one of those extremist, narrow conservatives. I want to be liked.

Which brings us to Mr. Lamborn. Mr. Lamborn gives off a very strong air of not caring whether he is popular. He also gives off a very strong air of caring more about being with his family than about the latest Republican gossip. It is an air that is at once entirely foreign and obnoxious to Party Insiders, who perceive Mr. Lamborn’s healthy adult disregard for their gossip as a personal affront, his innocently consistent and deep conservative conviction as another reason he doesn’t belong, his occupation of an office to which One Of Their Own is entitled as a temporary anomaly in the natural course of the cosmos, and his disregard for his personal popularity as crankiness and, well, unhipness.

It's somewhat like the way athletes in high school view their studious contemporaries. Nobody ever officially anointed the athletes the In Crowd; they just assumed the office and acted the party naturally. You might say, as Thomas Sowell put it, they are the Self-Anointed. Nobody ever officially anointed the studious crowd the Out Crowd either; it just never occurred to them, even if they played sports, to sacrifice their studies for some short-term popularity. They rarely lived to regret that position.

All this is simply to say that Mr. Lamborn is still the hero of a man he was in 2006. His victory then, with its comeback nature, was the sweet kind of electoral justice that is becoming more and more rare in the GOP as the memory of Reagan, about which Mr. Lamborn knows more than any of his critics, fades further and further into the distance. He has been a stellar congressman, showing the same stout nerve and principled conviction in Washington that he showed for 12 years in Denver.

By deciding to challenge him in the 2008 primary, Mr. Crank is guilty of the very bad faith of which he and his most vocal supporters have spent so much time and energy attempting to convict Mr. Lamborn. And by soldiering on steadfastly in the face of such inane opposition, as he has now done in legislative office for a decade and a half, Mr. Lamborn continues to model before God and man what it means to be committed to the truth, and thus to the true interest of his Party.

Why another primary in 5th CD?

Darn, just when it appeared Colorado Republicans might halt their tantrums and grow up, the bitterness breaks out again. Bob Schaffer is our consensus nominee for US Senate next year, so far so good. But now the brooding also-rans in last year’s 5th CD primary, Jeff Crank and perhaps also Bentley Rayburn, want another shot at freshman Congressman Doug Lamborn of Colorado Springs. Why would this be, other than personal pique or stylistic distaste for the uncharismatic but solid-voting incumbent?

Lamborn is a Reaganite if there ever was one, and 2008 is a year for party unity and discipline if there ever was one. After an ugly Senate primary between Schaffer and Coors in 2004, internecine strife over Ref C in 2005, and a nasty battle between Beauprez and Holtzman for the Guv nomination in 2006, Republicans don’t need Diaper War IV this time around.

Forcing Lamborn into a bloody fight for renomination over the next 12 months (yes, it’s that far to the primary election) can only diminish GOP hopes of holding the Senate seat as Wayne Allard retires and hurt our chance of gaining seats — let alone retaking the majority — in the state legislature.

Fighting Democrats, not each other, needs to be the name of the game, I keep telling my party brethren and sistren. Seems too few are listening. There’s some small consolation, but not enough, in seeing the Polis-Fitzgerald-Shafroth scrap among 2nd CD Dems turn nasty as well. “Can’t we all just get along?” Where’s Rodney King when you need him?

Challenges for President Sarkozy

Going back to France after spending a year in the western United States brings the ills that stubbornly plague French society into even sharper focus. If Mr. Sarkozy, the new President of France, is to break with the past, as he promised during the campaign earlier this year, and revitalize a sclerotic nation, he will have to take up one formidable challenge: initiating a genuine cultural and psychological revolution in a country where l’exception francaise precludes national self-criticism. Described in very basic terms, France is a socialist country where Thomas Hobbes’ theory of man’s natural state has been fully objectified not despite, but with the full complicity of, Leviathan, leading the nation to decadence.

To put it differently, successive French governments, equally from the center left and the center right, have, in stark and willful contrast to some of their more enlightened Anglo-Saxon counterparts of the early 1980’s, traditionally resorted to the power of the state to insure that all members of society, regardless of merit and abilities, have access to material well-being, fostering irresponsibility and an entitlement mentality in the process.

Egalite in Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite has maddeningly come to be expected to mean equality of outcome.

Cajoling or shoving the French into thinking in terms of self-denial, discipline, self-regulation, and independence will assuredly take more than mere campaign rhetoric. President Sarkozy has shown himself disappointingly conscious of the risks: he has so far basically taken the bite out of his promised reforms in higher education and trade union laws in order to rumple as few feathers as possible.

No wonder the French claim to be happy with President Sarkozy’s elaborate window-dressing so far, as a recent opinion poll shows. Even more ominous is their disapproval of Mr. Sarkozy’s already diluted plans to reduce the number of public employees. Cutting a bloated bureaucracy down to size was counterintuitively not what French citizens expected from their new President when they voted for him back in May.

The reason? The French generally much prefer the law of the jungle to more civilized methods of government. How much more convenient and rewarding for many of them to selectively get together as a group and blackmail a subservient government into extorting for them a share of a pie that others have painstakingly and legitimately prepared and cooked by and for themselves!

Large battalions of selfless bureaucrats are only too happy to oblige. How much more mature of lookers-on to throw tantrums at that particular group’s audacity and success and to blubberingly vow to do the same! How much more electorally worthwhile for Leviathan not to guarantee the rights of the weak against the strong as Hobbes theorized but to cowardly crush the weak in the stampede started by the deceptively strong!

Do the weak really mind? Not a bit! After all, they know they can band together some day too and ransack the nation with a nod and a wink at the only reaction the government can summon enough courage and strength to have. In this context, no one should be surprised that the French word for “qualms” should, to all intents and purposes, have disappeared from the French language.

The importance of social cohesion based on such ideals as responsibility, character, charity, the work ethic, the sanctity of individual freedom consistent with order, free enterprise, and constitutional checks and balances sounds terribly passé, if at all intelligible.

In the five years ahead of him as President, if Mr. Sarkozy is to reconcile the French with each other and steer the country back in the direction of civilization and a constructive role in world affairs, he will have to spend many more summer vacations in Wolfeboro, N.H., … and read John Locke.

Note: "Paoli" is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a good friend of America. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

'City on a hill' implies choice, not coercion

I am certain that as a Christian, I am called to let my light shine before all men, and I am equally certain that belief led our founders – and Ronald Reagan for that matter – to conclude that we are to participate in our civic duty toward a "shining city upon a hill." I am very much less convinced that such a city is to be a "Christian society," which has recently seemed to imply a "moral majority" imposing some kind of theocracy. Background: My two posts here so far have centered on living Christianly. The degree to which this affects one’s political philosophy is a deep question, and one to which I am certain that I cannot provide a complete answer. But I ended my last post by saying that you cannot simply enact laws that impose morality on others -- rather you must argue persuasively and convince others of the truth.

A city upon a hill that has a thousand individual lights burning brightly is far different, but brighter, than a city that mandates folks turn their lights on. As a Christian, I don’t believe you can make another turn on a light they do not possess anyway.

So I’ve come to this conclusion: It is my duty to shine my light and to persuade others of what I believe. It is the right and responsibility of others to do the same, whatever they may believe. As a society then our primary civic responsibility is to create and protect a public dialogue where ideas and visions can be reasoned, and debated and the Truth made clear.

So what is my individual responsibility? I think John Andrews recent column on “Element R,” an American responsibility movement, was a step in a similar direction. Although we have different starting points, both John and I have come to believe that the responsibility of the individual must temper and inform – and perhaps even preempt – the rights of the individual.

I’d like to make a bold statement. I believe that Jesus was primarily concerned about the individual. Throughout his ministry on earth, Jesus Christ addressed individuals in their particular circumstances. I do not feel I am overstretching or reaching when I say that Jesus was far more concerned about bringing individuals to his Father, and to mending the broken hearts of those He met, than He was about establishing a Christian society. Surely Jesus was aware of the political and social implications of his teachings, but He was far more aware of the needs of people around him, aware of the condition of their spirits -- and he addressed himself to healing them, not the ills of their culture.

As I have thought about this I am led to the conclusion that Jesus is not primarily concerned with the political ramifications of his words, and that His call to us is to live our lives as examples, as lights within a city so that we may persuade others to seek to live righteously as well.