The following letter was sent to every Republican and Independent Sentator and Representative on January 20, 2009 by a member of our staff.  Since that time, only two responses were received.  Congressman Paul Ryan’s response and Senator Joseph Lieberman’s response is linked below.

We reproduce the letter here for your reading.

Congressman Paul Ryan’s Response

Senator Joseph Lieberman’s Response

20 January 2009

Dear Senator:

We would be wise to remember the lessons of our youth, for our history is meant to serve as a guide for our future actions and not meant to simply be reflected upon.  And our nation’s history has been warning us for some time now that America is in trouble.

America is in trouble, Senator.

I am a registered Republican.  And I have always voted Republican, including by absentee while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Kazakhstan.  I love my country as I do my family.  My parents would tell me in my adolescent years-as I experimented with rejecting aspects of the foundation they worked tirelessly to create in what would become my character-that while they may not always like me, may not always like the choices I make or the company I keep or the opinions I defend, they would always love me.  My parents would always love me because I was their son, and there would be nothing I could do that would alter such a parental sentiment.  It is with that sentiment that I express my love for my country, the idea of my country, the country I know it has been and could be.  It is that sentiment I share with you as I express my affection for the ideals of the Republican Party, its principles of smaller government, low taxes, conservative family values and defense of free market capitalism.

And it is with that sentiment that I painfully admit that while I love my country, love the values the Republican Party has offered my countrymen, I do not like the country America is developing into nor do I like the crisis of character the Republican Party is allowing to manifest across its ranks.  And as with any adolescent in any American family, drift too far and for too long from the foundation your creators developed in your life and there will come a moment when you look over your shoulder and fail to recognize the history that follows you, or if it is indeed recognizable it will be of a nature your creators would not be proud of, would not have accepted-would not have liked.

We are on our way to just such a moment-for to personify America, she is creating a history unfaithful to the vision of our Founding Fathers, and may well drift too far for too long to again recognize the beacon of freedom and hope she was raised to offer her citizenry and the world. 

And the Republican Party is allowing it to occur.

While I am sure I am not the first American citizen to offer you such words, and the editorial pages of our newspapers since November 4^th have not wanted for yet another op-ed on what the Republican Party needs to do in order to retake control of both Congress and the White House, I do have a bold suggestion on how you can reclaim the values of Lincoln, reestablish the vision first conceived by Adams and Jefferson, and defend a nation in the spirit of Washington.  But in order for you to accept such a change of approach to governance you will have to find agreement in my following assessment of our current state of affairs.

Our country needs significant restructuring.  And any corporate restructuring guru worth his weight will tell you that it takes outside critique to reveal what boards and management are unable to see.  Restructuring does not have to equate with a vote of no confidence in the board or management, provided the board and management are willing and skilled to see their organization in a different light, with a different perspective, and with a selfless desire to see their organization prosper.  But that is what the American people offered the Republican Party last November 4^th.  The American people have turned the spotlight on your Party; they are looking in from a new sideline and demanding a political if not ideological restructuring. 

Despite the Democratic Party’s new political majority, I will not believe that a majority of the voting population honestly desires President-elect Obama’s socialist agenda, or that they revile President Bush to the extent the media and its polling has suggested.  What the American people are is frustrated, lacking direction, and in the absence of responsible leadership are compelled to accept the words of a charismatic unknown.  (Sometimes adults are nothing more than the impressionable adolescents of their youth.)  React to this year’s defeat in both the White House and Congress as an opportunity to restructure the Republican Party as the standard bearer of the vision of our Founding Fathers and the American people will return to you in far greater numbers.  Continue to abandon the Founders’ idea of America and we are all destined for failure-not Democrats, not Republicans, but Americans.  The Republican Party has the ability to right this country and restore the idea of America.

On most days of the week, government should step aside and allow the populace and the free markets to dictate the social compact we each have with one another-that governments exist to ensure our basic liberties as determined by Jefferson, and enlightened visionaries such as Locke and Rousseau before him.  But every once in a while governments should recognize that the people who elected them to represent their interests have lost their way and require leadership and direction, even if the people don’t yet realize it.  Sometimes we need our governing bodies to protect and defend our Founding Principles even if a majority of our population is asking for something contrary.  Sometimes the nature of our democracy compels us to drift too far and for too long from what our Founders created, and it is the responsibility of our government-it is their mandate-to bring us back to the values that first gave rise to our great nation. 

Now is one of those times.

Patriotic Americans need the Republican Party to assert itself as the Party of our Founding Fathers, as the Party willing to defend the democratic, free market values first codified in our Founding Document-our statement of birth to a watchful global audience.  We need the Republican Party to unite around our Founding Principles, articulate them to the American People, and demonstrate their willingness to practice them, even at the short-term cost of lost Congressional seats (that means excoriating individuals in your own party like Ted Stevens of Alaska for his crimes and stripping him of his seat yourselves; one cannot hold the high moral ground if he is himself suspect of immorality).  The Republican Party needs to recognize what were the honest factors contributing to its defeat in our most recent election, to ignore the media’s assessment of what went wrong (as its political leanings are largely liberal in nature), and to be steadfast in not discarding what has defined the Party well.  The world is indeed watching once again to see how our great nation will choose to define itself at this watershed moment.  And it shares the same hope Americans have had for some time now-change.

The President-elect ran a masterful campaign utilizing a theme of change, and articulated it consistently and with seemingly honest poise.  His campaign rhetoric reminded me of one of the reasons we honor our Founders.  We honor them not only for their vision and their competence, but for their eloquence.  Despite all of the polling and commentary on why Barack Obama won the 2008 election, one of the principle reasons for his victory was neither political nor racial-it was grammatical.  The President-elect offered the American people-both Democrats and Republicans-something they hadn’t had in eight years: an inspirational voice in a time of turmoil, doubt and fear; a speaker who projects affinity with his audience and not detachment; an orator who spoke to his audience instead of at them.  It is what I believe allowed him to sufficiently misdirect his audience away from his socialist agenda in order to capture the election.  President Bush has been a leader worthy of our respect, and served the Office of the President with significantly more dignity than his predecessor.  However, for eight years he has failed to connect with the majority of the American people on an oratorical level.  While both the intent and substance of his presidential voice has been honorable and worthy of an American president, its delivery has been perceived and interpreted (largely by media pundits and satirical late night comedy) as a stuttered over and muddled version of the English language, condescending in posture and arrogant in tone.  While it conveyed an honesty I personally agreed with, it often sounded too common for the Office of the President. How tragically unfortunate none of you demanded of our Commander-in-Chief a more committed attention to the art of public speaking, for his legislative record has been more impressive than the media would lead us to believe.  (Another of my parents’ adages, though not original, was that it was less important what I said than how I said it.  President Bush could have more successfully sold his administrative agenda if the explanatory words were delivered with more eloquence.)  He may not have been the leader forty-eight and one half percent of the voting populace wanted in 2000, but how quickly we discovered he was the leader we needed in the wake of September 11, 2001.  His leadership in the face of Islamic terrorism, United Nations ineptness and corruption, and a Democratic Party advocacy of a socialist agenda, has been a stellar example of steadfast adherence to conviction and principle.  And more often than not, it was an example of our defense of our Founding Principles under circumstances our Founders would have never imagined.

The Republican Party as well as its nominee for President should have stood by him this election cycle instead of sheepishly cowering out of his shadow, intent on distancing themselves from his administration for political reasons.  The lessons of our youth again serve as a guide for how we should conduct ourselves as adults.  While I quarreled with my siblings all our adolescent years, when the school yard bully stood before my younger brother I did not cower or allow my brother to stand alone or put distance between he and I out of a misplaced sense of self-preservation.  I stood with him because it was the right thing to do, because he is my blood and there is nothing that should stand between us even if we stand in opposition to one another-because standing by him was to persevere.  Standing by your Party’s two-time nominee for President of the United States was the right thing to do, for even while you may stand in opposition to each other on specific issues (and rightfully so with much of the President’s decisions of the last year), standing by the President of your Party is to persevere instead of allowing the Democrats to be permitted a presence between you.  It would have been an expression of character sensible Americans would have appreciated, even if they are currently a minority population.  You allowed President-elect Barack Obama’s claims of a third President Bush-term with a McCain victory to be universally construed as a negative.  What we now have is a cabinet under President-elect Obama comprised of upwards of 40% of former President Clinton Administration officials, and with more of a socialist bent today than any had in the 1990’s.

But we don’t have the time to dwell much longer on the defeats of the last election.  And thus my bold suggestion, for a crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste.  For the next two years, ignore all of your lobbyists, PACs, and special interests who you feel beholden to and to whom you believe your reelection depends.  Forget about the favors you owe, the money that is expected to change hands because of the decisions others wish for you to make, and serve something larger than all of us.  Think far less about maintaining your Congressional seat and far more about maintaining the existence of what is quickly becoming a fading America.

The time has since past for more blame trading sessions, obfuscation of critical issues relevant to both our lives and those of not only our children but all future generations of Americans; the time has since past to delay or to ignore or to deny the long overdue work of rebuilding our country into that beacon of hope about which the poets have written.  America is the most unique of the world’s nations both past and present for the single inspiring reason that it represents an idea more than anything else-and an incomplete idea at that.  Since the dawn of time, from the moment man exited his cave and acknowledged the heavens above, there has been nothing more powerful, more affective of change, more symbolic of the human experiment than that.  And the idea of America transcends all of us.  For that reason alone we should beholden ourselves to its continued protection, not to anyone or anything else, even if those are Americans themselves.  It is what our Founders practiced by example.  Yet it is what too many of our elected leaders have failed to remember or to respect.  Therefore, for the next two years I hope that you serve the idea of America-not your lobbyists, not your PACs, not your interest groups, not even your constituents should their desires not be in the interest of the idea of America.  Make the idea of America your only constituency.  Devote to the idea of America the entire breadth of your attention.  For if you do not, if the idea of America is allowed to whither, supplanted with a we’re-no-different-from-any-other-nation mentality, then we condemn to obscurity and malevolence not only all future generations of Americans but generations across the globe who will no longer have an example upon which to cast their hopeful gaze for a life of liberty and promise, where government of the people, by the people and for the people is permitted voice on a piece of this earth.  When government has become a system of patronage and favors, and where money is our god and politics our religion and the Church of Greed where we pray, we are too far gone from our mandate to ourselves, our commitment to the furthering of a more perfect union-for in our betrayal lies only commitment to the furtherance of our imperfections, our vice and sin.  We owe the legacy and spirit of our Founders better than that, we owe our future generations better than that-we owe ourselves better.

May you remember as this 44^th Presidential Administration and 111^th Congress asserts itself over a broken nation that you are public servants above all else, that your Party is our last best hope for furthering a nation worthy of our Founders’ admiration, and that the sons and daughters of our great nation are depending on your leadership more today than perhaps at any other time in our brief history.

Allow me to thank you for your service and wish you strength of character and national pride in your forthcoming term, enlightenment in your understanding of what is best for our country, and perseverance in what will be a serious test of character in the face of an opposition government determined to take our nation away from what undoubtedly was our Founders’ vision of a shining city upon a hill.

Respectfully Yours.

 cc:

All Republican Members of the United States Senate

All Republican Members of the United States House of Representatives

Download a PDF of this Post at obamaschangeagents

[New York, 20 December 2008]

So much for President-elect Obama’s promises of change. 

In an opening sequence in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his 2005 hit, Batman Begins, the film’s criminals furtively meet to discuss their criminal deeds, as one villain admits to another, “I said my drugs would take you places; I never said they would be places you wanted to be.” It was the deceptive betrayal in the content of that admission I was reminded of with Obama’s latest administrative appointment, Maria Shapiro, to replace Christopher Cox as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Ms. Shapiro, formerly the head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority which is responsible for regulating brokerages (among which would have been Bernard Madoff’s firm), has a sum total of zero historical achievements in tough regulatory oversight.  On the newly created Economic Recover Advisory Board is the role of Chief Economist, announced to be filled with Austan Goolsbee who, among his otherwise distinctive qualifications, wrote a sterling defense of subprime mortgages in a March 2007 New York Times article (and to unnecessarily remind, subprime mortgages rank at the top of the list of triggers setting off our current global financial crisis). 

“I promised you change,” one could hear the President-elect say. “I never said it was the constructive, reform-minded change our country desperately needs.”  And so it goes with the vast majority of his administration appointments to date-a Who’s Who of Been-There-Done-That.

Of the fifteen cabinet positions in the Presidential line of succession (excluding the Vice President, Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate), Obama’s selections break down as follows:

• 40% are former President Bill Clinton appointees
• 73% are Democrats
• 20% are women
• 27% are minority (non-Caucasian)

Comparing to President Bush’s current cabinet:

• 13% are former President George Bush (41) appointees
• 87% are Republican
• 27% are women
• 20% are minority (non-Caucasian)

The only significant change they collectively represent is that none of them are of Bush’s cabinet (save for Secretary Gates, but we’ll revisit that in 12 months when he joins the ranks of an aspiring 10% unemployment rate).  In an age where Hollywood churns out remakes (pitiable ones at that) of other’s past work, pop artists remake classic tunes in poor taste for a generation ignorant to the original artists, and fashion designers are torn between offering us styles that live only on a runway or were first and last in fashion decades earlier, why should we count on politics to provide us with much needed originality?

Obama’s cabinet tells no different a story than Bush’s in its penchant for change, reform, or acknowledging the gravity of our times.  It is what we have come to expect from any politician achieving the highest office in our land-Democrat or Republican.

However, the quantity of former Clinton staff is a little more than eyebrow-raising.  The President-elect’s reasoning seems to be that the 1990’s were a much better decade than the first of the new millennium: no protracted military conflict, no financial crisis, no deterioration of civil liberties, greater international respect for the United States and in turn, a greater US respect for the international community.  Is anyone willing to acknowledge that the policies of the 1990’s may have contributed to the policies of this first millennial decade?  Or that the suffering of this decade may have been born in the last?  Or that had Clinton been a more effective president, Bush may have had a less arduous administration?  While not seeking to absolve the Bush administration of arguable short comings, or to place undue blame for Bush policy on Clinton’s administration, to structure the Obama administration as a repeat of the Clinton administration and assume better times is to both ignore the lessons learned in the last eight years and to mistakenly praise as righteous the eight years before that.

But the last thing we at Our Founding Sons wish to do is portray ourselves as naïve: a President McCain offered us nothing in his campaign to suggest he’d be any different in his cabinet post selections.  More alarming was McCain’s extreme erraticism in the final months of the campaign which could lead one to surmise a cabinet post for a Senator Obama could very well have been in the President-elect McCain deck of cards.  Politics-as-usual is not a strategy unique to a particular political party. And Obama’s selections offer us little hope for his promised change, with one exception.  Arne Duncan is both a politically prudent and hopeful selection for Secretary of Education.  While we of course wish success for each of the cabinet appointees (assuming Senate confirmation) we intend to pay special attention to Mr. Duncan.  We believe there is no greater issue requiring the full force of our government than education, particularly education reform.  Let’s hope Mr. Duncan is adept enough to do what no Education Secretary has been able to do in decades-prepare our young citizens today for the world that awaits them.

Obama doesn’t score much better, however, on his appointees to his other cabinet and sub-cabinet level positions.  In fact, in the area of gender diversity, Obama falls far short of the inroads made by his predecessor.  Of the fifteen positions highlighted below, President Bush filled 54% of them with women, compared to President-elect Obama’s 15%.  And on the question of a Clinton III Administration, Obama has filled these fifteen positions with 38% of former Clinton White House staff, compared to 15% of former Bush (41) staff appointed by President Bush (43).  However, in the area of political bipartisanship (both Obama and Bush filled 100% of the below positions with their own party) and racial diversity (Obama filled 8% to Bush’s 3% of the below positions with minority candidates), politics-as-usual continues to prevail.

On August 28^th of this year, at a DNC speech, President-elect Obama declared that, “change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington.”

With 30 top cabinet and sub cabinet positions announced, with the complete Presidential line of succession appointed, with the departments that are to oversee our financial, educational, and military industries already provided with the leadership that has been promised to change our country, reform our country-better our lives and the lives of our children-we find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering in what cities across the country are our change agents with tickets to Washington waiting for their rides?  We’ll go pick them up ourselves and drive them to the White House.

All we need is an address, Mr. President-elect.