Dear Washington, It’s time to reach deep

Dear President Obama and Members of Congress:

Like you, I am outraged. Our country has piled up too much debt. I know many who have sat where you do had the political luxury to blame somebody else for the problems the country faced and leave much of the mess to be solved by the next group to take power. Sorry, but you do not serve in such times. You must do the job you were elected to do.

Former Presidents and Congresses took us to war, did their best to avert economic calamity and tried to set the United States on a course to broad prosperity. And, yes, hindsight shows some of their decisions were wise and a few were something less. Regardless of their intentions, good or otherwise, the paved American road has led us up a mountain of debt. It is up to you whether we begin the coast down, or we drive off a cliff. If you are having difficulty making the decision, here’s a hint, the cliff option will end badly. You do not really have a choice. Raise the debt ceiling – the sooner the better.

Unfortunately, too many of you are singularly focused in placing fault at the feet of your opponents in a self-serving attempt to sway voter support for your party. Most of us are tired of this foolishness. Your countrymen need for you to act as patriots. Set aside your personal ambition, stand shoulder to shoulder with your fellow Americans and get to work building the nation the next generation deserves.

The U.S. faces challenges and threats we could not imagine a decade ago. If you continue to abdicate your duty by standing at microphones telling us “it is time to eat our peas” or likening the other side to Jell-o, our national crisis will mount and these threats will become all the more ominous. Every day you do so, the American future seems to dim a bit.

It is time to settle this matter. The first step is raising the debt ceiling. This will stop the needless hysteria your inaction has caused. Next, get to work developing a plan to reduce the debt. The United States government is huge. There are countless ways to make it smaller.

Don’t be fooled. The solution has little to do with which party takes the White House and Congress in the election of 2012. We do not need a Democrat or Republican majority to move us forward. We need Americans who are willing to put partisanship aside and commit to working together. I am asking for each of you to reach deep inside and find what is required for you to become one of those Americans. It’s kind of important. The future of our nation depends on it.

Sincerely yours,
Graham Gillette

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com

Other recent blogs by Graham Gillette

The Worst President Ever!

I spent months tallying data to definitively determine the worst President of the Unites States ever.  The answer: Grover Cleveland.

OK, he wasn't the worst ever, but I did hear an interesting story on NPR this morning about how Cleveland snuck away for five days in the summer of 1893 to have a cancerous tumor removed from his mouth.  The whole procedure was performed aboard his friend’s fishing boat to keep the surgery a secret.  True story.

Times change.  In 2011, President Obama couldn't sneak away for five hours without cameras catching the President and a short-panted Speaker Boehner playing golf.

Yet, some things stay the same.  In every campaign season we reach a point when there seems no shortage of those willing to reduce mountains of data into neat sound bites to show indubitably they are on the side of right and the other side is not only wrong, but possibly evil.  We may have reached the crazed phase of speaking in partisan absolutes a bit early this election cycle.

A case in point is Jeffrey H. Anderson’s current blog at the conservative Weekly Standard.  Anderson takes a bunch of actual facts, strips away a cluster of others and sprinkles in a dash of political rhetoric to brew up his argument that the Obama Administration is a failure.

Taking numbers from a report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, Anderson writes the economic stimulus package pushed by President Obama has cost $666 billion to date.  (Anderson may not have appreciated the happy coincidence that 666 is a popular Biblical reference to evil and the Antichrist, but something tells me a number of his readers did.)   He then divides that by 2.4 million, the number of jobs some have estimated were created or saved by stimulus spending, to create this tasty morsel, “In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ‘stimulus,’ and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.”

The problem with his construct is one has to ignore the fact the "stimulus" program wasn't just about jobs.  A portion of the money expended went for non-job items like the tax credit 110 million working families received, the $27 billion in small business loans 110,000 small businesses received, and the more than 75,000 projects that improved some of the country’s infrastructure. Jobs are important, but the improved roads and other assets the government will own and use long into the future need to be calculated if an analysis of the impact of the stimulus expenditure is to be taken seriously.

I have to admit it is kind of fun to ponder what would have happened if 2.4 million Americans would have received checks for $100k, but I tend to agree with a tenet long espoused by many of the writers and readers of the Weekly Standard that entitlement programs have a limited place in good government.  And, handing out whopping checks to a few individuals would have done nothing to improve the bridges, ports and countless other pieces of infrastructure seen as vital to Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike.

In Anderson’s rush to condemn the stimulus and the President’s policies, he played with the facts and hurt his own argument.

Just as important. one can’t evaluate history before it has occurred.  Like whiskey, history must be distilled.  Both are complex compounds containing a vast range of ingredients and neither can be assessed fully while still being made.  It takes a long while before anyone can evaluate either with any objectivity and it is not possible to strip away individual ingredients from the final brews.  History, like whiskey, has to be evaluated on the whole.

There were no shortage of people willing to pontificate about how President George W. Bush was taking a direct route into the history books to destination “worst ever” while he was Commander in Chief.  And, there seem to be at least as many who are willing to sum up President Obama’s record before the facts can be written as well.  Time will tell and by then partisans like Mr. Anderson will be trying to creatively interpret the historical record of some other politician long before it has been written.

We have a long way to travel before the 2012 election.  I, for one, am going to do my best to recognize the difference between what is fact and what is a half-truth partisan absolute.  I hope most of my fellow voters will do the same.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.

My American Pledge

Today, Congressional Republicans released a Pledge to America, a series of guiding principles intended to show how Republicans will lead if they take control of the House.  Among other promises in the twenty one page document, those signing “pledge to honor families, traditional marriage, life, and the private and faith-based organizations that form the core of our American values.”  I will ignore the political code words in that and applaud them for at least saying something about what they will do.  It is a switch from a campaign based on complaining about what others have done and scaring people about what these others might do.

The 1994 Contract with America, devised by former Speaker Newt Gingrich, was simple and, as such, served as an outstanding election tool.  Like much in politics today, this new document is convoluted.  The Contract was clear-cut and linked to specific legislation.  Incidentally, Congress passed 60% of those bills in the first few months of taking power.  Perhaps the Pledge will offer a similar roadmap.  Time will tell.

In the meantime, I drew up my own pledge to guide me in this and all future elections.

I, pledge to:

1. Pay less attention to the Party label/single issue/tagline a candidate chooses and more attention to her values, experience and ability to do the job she seeks.
2. Stop allowing those who seek power/money/influence/self aggrandizement to cloud my thinking.  It may be fun to listen to the media talking heads make a game out of politics, but their talk can be destructive.  I am interested in making the world a better place.  To do so, I will seek information to help me decide what is best for my country, my state, my community and my family and I will discard meaningless rhetoric.
3. Listen to others (real people, not the talking heads mentioned above).  I accept I do not know everything.  By learning from others, even those with whom I disagree, I will become a better, more informed voter and citizen.
4. Participate.  It is my duty to become informed on issues affecting me, my family, my neighbors and my countrymen.  I may not know what it is to be gay/minority/rich/poor/disabled/fill-in-the-blank, but it is my patriotic responsibility to help those in need, those discriminated against and all of my fellow Americans.  We all have a right to pursue the promise of freedom, the American dream.  I must act and not wait for others to do so.
5. Remember elections are not sporting events.  I do not seek wins for the red or blue column, having more R’s than D’s in a diagram, or a conquest of one party over another.  An election does not end in triumph; it only decides who will next enter the arena.  A victory is achieved when our country takes another step toward assuring freedom, equality and justice for all.  This happens with collective action, not vote counting.
6. Vote for candidates who will honestly evaluate each bill, situation and issue before them and who will base decisions on what is right for the people they wish to serve, not on what is best for the candidate or his Party.
7. Vote for candidates who understand our Constitution – the whole document – and who will not play favorites with the sections expedient to advancing the cause du jour.[i]
8. To be strengthened, not limited, by history.  Like my own, America’s past is filled with successes and mistakes.  I will not rest on the achievements of yesterday or dwell on its errors.  I will build on what has been learned.
9. To be fair.  Freedom dies without justice.  I will fight for fairness and justice and will support only those candidates for office who will do the same.
10. To take advantage of all America provides.  The best way to spread freedom at home and abroad is to treat others as we wish to be treated.  If my fellow Americans and I thrive and we remain true to protecting freedom here and, when we can, elsewhere; more will join us and freedom will blossom in every corner of our country and in the most distant, hostile parts of the world.

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[i] The first “pledge” in the Republican Pledge to America is to pay more attention to the 10^th Amendment than to the rest of Constitution.  Sorry, guys, the whole thing is important.  You don’t get to pick your favorite part as an excuse to overlook the rest. They also say they will honor the “original intent” of the Framers.  Unless you were actually one of the original framers, there is no way for you to know for sure what they intended.  It is better to stick to the document and make a case for what you believe than to pretend like you know what you want to do was intended by the Founders and what the opposition says was not.  The text from the Pledge reads: “We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored – particularly the Tenth Amendment, which grants that all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”


(Contact Graham Gillette at grahamgillette@gmail.com)

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.