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 hitting bottom with al franken

[New York, January 9, 2009]

Recovering addicts of drugs or alcohol would almost universally agree that their willingness to rise above their addiction did not occur until they hit bottom, an expression used to mean their arrival at the lowest point in a downward spiral of self-defeat.  Admitting that we have hit bottom is cathartic, has the unique ability to be restorative, and may well serve as our last best opportunity to conquer what has been defeating us.  To the addict in denial of his illness, reaching his particular bottom is largely avoided and/or delayed through illogically construed rationalizations arguing for his control over the situation, or why the problem is not with him but rather with all of his critics and detractors.

But when the bottom is finally reached (and accepted) it is an opportunity we must not ignore, a moment that cannot be dismissed for the outcome is all but certain should we allow inaction of both mind and body to prevail.  The danger is that our bottom could also become a figurative top-the top of our own grave.

If our decline to this point has so far eluded us, we should thank Al Franken for (finally?) illuminating what most assuredly is the dark bottom of our long endured fall from meritorious political representation.  We are not going to wait for the Minnesota recount debacle (for that’s what it is) and subsequent court involvement to conclude before passing our judgment.  The vote count controversy is not what has brought us to this particular nadir of our election process (although how we certify and count our ballots for positions of high office in a nation that pioneered nuclear fission and the internet must surely be on a to-do list for any incoming Congress.)  And before the left side of the political spectrum raises arms against what they would incorrectly assume is a partisan attack, the words and sentiment used in this article would read exactly the same if Franken were Republican.  Some of our favorite Presidents, Senators and Representatives have been Democrats, as is our favorite Mayor currently serving the city of New York (that is before he changed party affiliation-twice.)

No, we have reached the bottom of political representation-representation in a revered house of legislature in a nation whose government has been modeled across the globe in developing democracies-because Al Franken represents the punch line to the unfortunate joke that has become America’s understanding of and respect for our representative government, its history, its intended design, and the learned men and women who have had the great privilege to walk the halls as elected participants.  The great triumvirate of Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay; the integrity and leadership of Robert La Follette, George Norris, Robert Taft, Oliver Ellsworth, Thomas Hart Benton, and Arthur H. Vanderberg-there is a reason these figures are considered among the very best of our Senate history, and there is a reason all current and future Senators should aspire to such recognition when their own legislative record is reviewed by history.  Are we to admit with a straight face that Al Franken deserves to call these individuals colleagues?  What would the Famous Five of the Senate have said on the first day of their respective Senate terms if the local comic was sworn in alongside of them?

If comedian Al Franken wants to serve his country (if Minnesotans want to see Al Franken in elected office) with no legislative, policy, even management experience, he would find better parity with his occupational background at the local level, say State Senator or Comptroller.  That is not to say Mr. Franken is not a professional or personable man, only-and we stress, only-that the United States Congress requires better, deserves better, should be better than what most of us have to offer.  Otherwise, we should quickly alter our republic to a direct democracy and have the entire population vote on every piece of legislation.  Let’s see how well we fare as a nation when we no longer presume that the greatest issues of our day are presided over by our most learned, esteemed, educated and worldly citizens-and instead by the general populace whose national math and science scores are no better than North Korea’s.

A quick Wikipedia search yields the following breakdown of Congress’s occupational background:

• 215 with a law background (180 holding Juris Doctor degrees)
• 180 come from private sector business
• 18 hold MBAs
• 10 were former Congressional pages
• 16 were former White House staff
• 24 come from the field of medicine
• 15 are former law enforcement
• 9 scientists

…and one comic.

While the members of the House of Representatives are, by design, more numerous than Senators, and represent a more finite population within their respective states, an additional screen or radio personality we do not need in either house of our bicameral system.  Do we really want a professional comedian participating in the impeachment trial of a US President; or having the power to consent to treaties; or confirming Cabinet secretaries, federal judges and military officers?  And what experience does Mr. Franken bring to the Senate?  He was one of the original writers at Saturday Night Live where he admitted to using cocaine; starred in such films as One More Saturday Night, Stuart Saves His Family and Al Franken: God Spoke (yeah, we haven’t heard of any of them either); wrote a New York Times bestseller titled Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations; and since 2005 has been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post (that point excited half of our own staff now that “blogging” has been deemed an acceptable qualification for Senatorial aspirations).  A career comprised entirely of the utterance of liberal counterpoints to conservative ideals, of feuding with conservative radio and television personalities, of talking-nothing but talking (and acting)-has been accepted by 1.2 million Americans as being sufficient experience to serve as a United States Senator.

The US Senate was modeled after the ancient Roman Senate, its name coming from the Latin senatus meaning council of elders.  Al Franken an elder of the United States, learned in government affairs and wise in his application of legislation as it pertains to States’ representation?  (The recovering alcoholic is right now saying, “That’s exactly how I felt when I hit bottom.”)

When did our decline to this bleak level begin?  When did we take our first metaphorical hit of representative ineptitude, our first drink from the inebriating waters of political mediocrity?  When did every two-bit Hollywood resident start to believe that their right to free expression as well as presence on television, the radio or the internet extends to the delusion that s/he could make an adept legislator?  Like the teenagers who walk out of the theater at every martial arts movie believing that they too could perform the same artistry as the actor on screen, that by merely watching it somehow qualified them to do the same off screen, Americans must now see legislators appearing on television, commenting on legislation on the radio, and having their legislation quoted on the internet by millions of bloggers, and believe that because actors spend their own workday on television, radio talk show hosts spend their own workday on the radio, and bloggers spend their day and night within the world wide web’s blogosphere, that actual legislating must be an easy crossover?  It would be akin to arguing Tom Cruise’s role as an SS Officer in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie qualifies him to plot the assassination of Germany’s Chancellor Merkel; or more specifically, that Martin Sheen is qualified to be President of the United States because he played one on television for the equivalent length of two presidential administrations.  What a failed state we are in when the adults of our society start playing adolescent in their failure to discern the differences between television and reality.  Our future Secretary of State, former NY Senator, and First Lady Hillary Clinton correctly asserted that the Office of the President does not lend itself to on the job training.  Her assertion would have been equally as prescient if applied to the positions of US Senator or US Representative (or Vice President, read Sarah Palin’s nomination.)

It is said that in a democracy the people get the government they deserve.  The reality is that people get the government they elect-no more and no less.  When the New York Giants take the field against the Philadelphia Eagles in a playoff matchup this Sunday afternoon it will be first string quarterback Eli Manning who America will see run each and every offensive play, not a backup quarterback.  A Super Bowl ring will be at stake, the Giants want to defend their championship, and the Eagles are a formidable opponent.  And so only the very best will see action, only the most seasoned, tested players are elected to play.  Are the issues facing our government less important than a football playoff game?  Is the outcome of the performance of the people’s branch of government less enduring than a win or loss by the Giants Sunday afternoon?  Giants fans, football fans, the Giants offensive line all deserve to have Eli Manning-the very best of the Giants if not the NFC-in the position of quarterback.  The stakes are too high to not see him in the game.  Our government, the American people, our future generations all deserve to have the very best in our positions of representative government.  The stakes are too high to have anyone less.  When we fail to elect to government the individuals we need, we get a government we don’t want.  While the Giants may of course lose on Sunday-for their competition is fierce-their fans do not doubt that Eli Manning will offer them his very best.  They harbor no doubts of this because of the skills Mr. Manning brings to his position.  Mr. Franken may prove to be an able legislator.  But don’t the American people deserve to have him prove that in a less nationally consequential position?  After all, Eli Manning is in his current position only because of his proven worth over several years and settings of trials and challenges.  Is not the efficacy of our government representation worthy of the same confidence?

What we do having reached this bottom is entirely of our choosing.  Anything less than admitting we have reached a bottom and require immediate help, and we may fare just as the addict does who ignores arrival at his own bottom-he ultimately expires.