The Colorado Index

Two Sunday Editorials Worth Reading

The Rocky Mountain News has a George Will essay that is a history of what worked and what didn't in the Great Depression.

A true Ronald Reagan Republicn (as opposed to those who routinely reject his big tent principles but want to carry his mantle) writes in the Denver Post.  He laments the loss of the big tent that propelled Ronald Reagan to two terms.

Social Conservatism’s High Water Mark

Social Conservatism will always be a force in American politics, but it is hard to see that it will be the dominant force that it was just a few years ago.

Future historians will likely identify the high water mark of Social Conservative politics as the George W. Bush veto of the stem cell bill.  That will be true even if a viable work around is found using adult stem cells.

Beginning with the election after that veto, socially conservative members of Congress started getting knocked off like so many ten pins.

GWB demonstrated with this veto that while he wasn’t at all sympathetic to fiscal conservative issues, he was hyper sensitive to social conservatives.

Big mistake.

The Responsible Thing to do

Today is the day that all responsible pet owners dread.  Sometime in the next few hours we will be having our 22-year old cat put down.

It’s time.  We now realize that we should have done it two days ago when the vet ran some blood tests and told us that he had months to live, not years.  Decisions to put down a pet are necessarily unanimous within the family, and we didn’t have unanimity.

He can hardly walk.  He doesn’t groom himself anymore, and that cat was a fastidious groomer.  He has no energy.  He is stone deaf, and has been for several years.  In his prime, he weighed 9 pounds.  He is now a skin and bones 5 pounds.

Even so, that isn’t the pet that I hope to recall or will recall.

He came into our lives somewhat uninvited.  Someone preyed on our 11-year old daughter at the mall, claiming that if she didn’t take him home, they would have him killed.  She snuck him home under her coat.

Even so, as a cute black kitten, he was very hard to resist, especially when he fell asleep on my chest that first evening.

We had a golden retriever who loved kittens and was very patient with them.  She would lay very still in the family room while the kittens played with her.  Over time our cat became so comfortable with her that he would sleep outside with her in the fully stretched out position that cats assume when they feel completely safe.

She wasn’t just his friend, she was his protector and he seemed to know it.

Most outdoor cats don’t live as outdoor cats for more than a year or two.  This one regularly went outside and survived for twelve years.  That came to an end when we moved to a neighborhood full of foxes and coyotes.  Cats in that environment aren’t predators, they are prey.

I won’t bore you with all of my 22 years of good memories.  Let it be sufficient to note that I’ve wiped away the tears several times as I wrote this.

And yet, putting him down is the responsible thing to do.

Happy Thanksgiving

It seems silly not to acknowledge that on Thanksgiving and at Christmas people don't want to read about politics.

Today will be a day spent with family, as it should be.  Turkey, dressing, potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, all topped off with French Silk pie.

May you and yours have a happy thanksgiving.

On the Dead Pile

Anyone who has ever played card games has heard the term “the dead pile.”  It is where cards go that won’t be played again.

The Colorado Republican Party has a dead pile of politicians who might think of themselves as future candidates.  They are wrong.  Some of those politicians might still be trying to keep their corpse moving to create the impression of life, but few will be fooled.

Bob Schaffer:  Putting Bob Schaffer’s name on this list is one of the saddest things I have done.  He is a quality person.  The fact remains that he is now a two time loser for US Senate.

Bob Beauprez:  I’ve put a lot of personal sweat into getting the two Bobs elected.  Both got different kinds of sweat, but at about equal levels.   I don’t much like putting either in the Dead Pile.

Marc Holzman:  Marc Holzman couldn’t organize his way out of a wet paper bag in the 2006 election.  He couldn’t count delegates and he couldn’t figure out Colorado’s simple petition rules.  Then he had the bad grace to spend $2.5 million trying muddy up Bob Beauprez for the general election.  Face the State suggests that Mark Hillman lost that year because some voters confused the two at the ballot box.

Tom Tancredo:  The magic numbers are 44 and 32.  That is the difference in Hispanic vote for President between 2004 and 2008.

John Suthers:  On the wrong side of too many issues that conservatives care about.  He can win another term as Attorney General, but it is hard to see where he goes from there.

Jeff Crank / Bentley Rayburn:  Tandem losers in a race neither should have run.  Both could have been rising stars, but both are now two time losers. 

Marilyn Musgrave:  It should have been Focus on the Family’s highest priority to  match Tim Gill dollar for dollar.  She got outspent by $2 million.  Focus put its money in California.  So much for any pretense of loyalty.

Scott McInnes:  Paid his wife $40,000 out of his campaign funds at a time when he didn’t plan to run a campaign.  He might have put that behind him if he had stayed in Congress but he wanted to be a lawyer-lobbyist.

Bill Owens:  On the dead pile by his own choice.

Politicians who find themselves "on the dead pile" shouldn't assume that I am suggesting that they don't have a behind the scenes future in the party.  I'm only suggesting that they shouldn't expect to carry any significant banner in the future.

Back to Basics…And I Mean Basics Part 2

So, Senator Bridge to Nowhere is going to go to jail.  I can’t say that I am all that sorry.  I wish it had happened last year.   I’m sufficiently unhappy with him that I will say that I hope that the old boy dies there.

Cold, eh?

I’ve been watching politics for quite a long time, longer than many who read this have been alive.  I have yet to see a Republican politician who got wrapped in scandal get re-elected.  Democrats are a different story, but this essay isn’t about Democrats.

I thought for a while that Ted Stephens might be an exception.  He wasn’t.

Invariably, people like Ted Stephens are protected by the party elite when everyone involved knows that doing so will do no good.  Voters will always bring him … and them down.

No one seems to have the courage to cut these guys loose before they damage the party.

Henceforth, I will decline to vote for any Republican who has a history of trying to shield another Republican who gets himself involved a real scandal. 

It never works and never will, so why should I reward disloyalty to the party with my loyalty?

Back to Basics…And I Mean Basics Part 1

Politics 101 says that if you get elected or appointed to an office, you need to at least pretend to be responsive to the people who put you there.

In thinking back to my experiences with Republican office holders – that is all there is in El Paso County – too many lacked any pretense of humility, humanity, and empathy.

• The mayor can’t seem to find the time to respond to a citizen who is having trouble with an unresponsive police department.  He could care less that a police officer set up a meeting with a citizen and his lawyer and then went to the gym, leaving the lady at the front desk to say “SGT Konz said you would think the meeting was at 2, but it is at 2:30.”
• The state Senator who answered a letter as though he were knowledgeable of  its contents and then, when it became obvious that he hadn’t even read it stuck his finger in my chest proclaiming that he was too busy working on pro life and immigration issues to read my letter.
• The chairwoman of the local Judicial Performance Commission who didn’t do her job and now considers me a “threat,” though why I haven’t the faintest idea.
• A member of the same commission who was receiving copies of my emails from the chairwoman and hadn’t bothered to look at the documentation I submitted to discover that my lawsuit hadn’t come to trial sent me an obnoxious email claiming that I was a loser who wanted to relitigate my lawsuit. 
• I alerted another legislator that I would be testifying against a bill before the legislature and why.  Much to my amazement, half of the republicans on the committee left the room during the three minutes I had to testify to use the restroom.  In fairness, they had just sat through three hours on another bill, but I had to wonder why they couldn’t wait another three minutes as I was one of two people testifying against the bill.

Until I began writing this blog, I very seldom interacted with public officials on any issue.  Most of these interactions originated before I began writing, meaning that I was simply Joe Voter to them. 

If Republicans are to ever again prosper, someone needs to teach a class to new and old office holders alike that Republicans need to be seen as sympathetic and empathetic to those who are inclined to vote for them.

A Pure Party is a Small Party

Some conservatives are openly advocating a purified and smaller Republican party as the Gazette reports:

At an Independence Institute banquet Nov. 13, syndicated conservative columnist and Colorado resident Michelle Malkin addressed the fact Republicans are divided over faith-based politics, such as the need to ban abortion. She encouraged conservatives to maintain their positions on social issues despite pressures to back down. She said conservatives could work through immigration disagreements.

And what of economics-only libertarians, who largely despise the party's opposition to gay marriage, abortion and fetal stem cell research? Malkin said "let them go their own way."

Over the last decade, the 180,000 voter registration advantage owned by the Republicans in Colorado has completely evaporated.  If Michelle Malkin were talking about letting twenty, or even 200 people "go their own way," what she said might be justifiable.  But 200,000 is political suicide as recent results demonstrate.

Amendment 48 was such an overreaching amendment that few who thought it through could vote for it unless impelled by deep religious beliefs.  

One unintended outcome of putting Amendment 48 on the ballot was that the results quantified the core support level for social conservatism in Colorado at 27% of the electorate.  It may be lower if the Amendment propelled social conservatives to the polls, but it cannot be higher.

If one assumes that a substantial majority of those voters are in the Republican party, and that the Republican Party has about 33% of registrations, then about 80% of the current party consists of social conservatives.  The word "current" was chosen carefully because so many former Republicans have obviously already "gone their own way.

That 80% tracks closely with the percentage of Republicans who voted for Bob Schaffer.

In short, the Amendment 48 results suggest that a pure social conservative party starts out with 27% of the vote in Colorado.  It can climb no higher unless it is willing to accept fiscal conservatives as equals.  

For reasons that are completely incomprehensible, the social conservative faction of the party seems to be completely unable to grasp that concept.  If it could, their favored spokespersons wouldn't be saying "let them go their own way." 

The Party That Plays Together Stays Together

A few days after the election, I attended a meeting where a well known politician, a man whose views I usually respect and agree with, explained politely that the K. Roupe race proved that it did no good to match candidates with districts.

The facts might lead to a completely different conclusion.  It is a conclusion that might tear the Republican Party (such as it is) asunder, an outcome I hope to prevent.

If one looks at the Denver Post election returns for the state house races, the HD 17 K. Roupe race stands out like a sore thumb. 

All house districts are supposed to have roughly the same population.  That isn’t to say that all will have an equal number of voters.  Poorer districts tend to have more ineligible children as a percentage of the population than richer districts.  Some districts will grow their population between redistricting faster than others.

El Paso County prides itself on being the home of the vaunted El Paso County Republican turnout machine.  I have never heard a statewide candidate come to El Paso County and claim that he could win without a big turnout in El Paso County.  We don’t just have to win here, we have to win big.

Somehow the turnout machine failed to operate in HD 17 in 2008.  There Roupe lost by 380 votes out of 14,400 cast.  (News reports suggest that this data is out of date, but not so unreliable as to modify our point.)

Only one district in the state had a lower vote for state representative.  Only seven districts had fewer than 25,000 votes cast, and of those seven most came close to the 25,000 number without touching it.

I wrote last week in the most gentle terms possible about the rumor(s) going around that pressure was being put on local politicians regarding Roupe.  I leave it to you to guess where that pressure might have been rumored to be coming from.  I expected that if someone had campaigned with Roupe, they would speak up, or at least that someone would speak up for them.  No one has.

The extraordinarily low turnout in a district in a county with an organization that prides itself on turnout suggests that a lot of people were sitting on their hands in the hope that she would fail…and that they could claim that running a moderate in a moderate district doesn’t work.

Perhaps they are right, but for the wrong reason.  What the turnout (and the rumors) suggests is that social conservatives in El Paso County have made the decision that they would rather have a Democrat in that legislative seat than a Republican if that Republican doesn't share their views on abortion.

It goes further.  It might also mean that the Social Conservative leadership has made the decision that they would rather have a Democrat controlled legislature than run the risk that they couldn’t control a legislative majority made up of mostly social conservatives with a few social moderates thrown in.

I note that John Andrews is making the argument that since Kevin Lundberg got more votes than his rival for the Steve Johnson seat, he should be named state senator.  The implications of the Roupe undervote make that kind of vote tally argument completely worthless, at least for this cycle.

If the social conservatives running and representing El Paso County sought to strengthen the hand of social conservatism by letting Roupe twist in the wind, they may find that they have done the opposite.  It is hard to see how they can ask moderates to work and vote for their candidates when they won't work and vote for moderates in districts where conservatives can't win.

The Party that plays together stays together.

Things I Learned This Week

• I wrote an essay for publication yesterday.  It hit the Intertubes at noon today.  To publish an essay on one's blog, the author must first change the posting status to "Publish Now," not "draft."  Who knew?

• Money may not be the root of all evil, but it is the root of 99.9 percent of arguments between married couples.
  

• While updating software at work, I learned that glitches will convert productivity to nearly nil until one installs patches, converts old data files, and reboots Windows several hundred times.  My hair grayed from this effort.

• Libertarians appear disappointed with Barack Obama's presumed nominee for Attorney General, Eric Holder.  Apparently, they believed that President-elect Obama would provide policies de-escalating the drug war and liberalizing marajuana laws.  While I (in the William F. Buckley mold) agree with the idea of decriminalizing marijuana (as prohibition of drugs causes similar violence without reducing demand just like prohibition of alcohol did in the 1920's), I highly doubted an Obama administration would be more permissive on drug laws.  One wonders if the libertarian Obama voters will be surprised if he increases government spending and taxes, too.

• Happy 150th birthday to my adopted hometown of Denver tomorrow.  Both the Post and the Rocky have special sections devoted to it.  Could those pioneers who created the settlement at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River know how prominent a city Denver would become in the years ahead?

• With Thanksgiving coming next week, my father-in-law and stepmother-in-law will visit from Ohio.  They plan to leave Saturday (likely after the Ohio State-Michigan game), and stay for the week.  I may ask my boss for overtime next week (just kidding).

• As I am the cook in the Civil Sense household, I am preparing Thanksgiving dinner using my mom's old recipes.  One of her recipes was for cranberry relish.  Oddly enough, the recipe was quite similar to a recipe from my in-laws.  I successfully combined those two recipes for past Thanksgiving meals, and as a thank-you to my readers, I will provide the recipe to you in case you wish to use it for your menu:

Cranberry Relish

24 oz. whole fresh cranberries (works best if berries are frozen first).
2 medium oranges, seeded and quartered
1 lemon, seeded
1 lime, seeded
2-2.5 cups sugar

Using a food processor, grind cranberries.  Put ground cranberries into a bowl.  Grate 1/2 of the orange, lemon, and lime rinds into bowl.  Peel and grind remainder of fruit into bowl.  Add sugar and mix.  Chill overnight.

by Civil Sense