A Call for Open Government

In 1775, a nation was purportedly conceived behind a veil. Amidst the shut windows and closed doors of the Pennsylvania State House, 343 of the nation’s most stalwart citizens entered and exited the Second Continental Congress in what was legendarily secret. Here they managed a ballooning crisis with their fatherland, and, together, forged a common bond that founded a nation.

But those officials had something today’s do not – government accountability. The unjust taxes, the innocent citizen casualties, and the dismay of Great Britain were shared. It bridged a gap between citizen and government. Vital to this connection was the media, and the outcome of the American Revolution may have been substantially different without the honesty and clarity they transferred.

But this pivotal role did not cease at national foundation. William Lloyd Garrison was a beacon of morality that helped abolish slavery. Journalism raked through the unsanitary conditions of the early 20th Century food industry. Nary could an American dismiss Walter Cronkite as he delivered the Vietnam War to American television sets. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward used transparency to unearth Watergate. And, most recently, DrudgeReport.com revealed the shocking Whitewater scandal in 1998.

Though investigative journalism shed light on a litany of our government’s darkest secrets, Americans have come to accept a deeper veil of secrecy. Beginning September 11, 2001, many citizens became so terrified, they delivered Pres. Bush a blank check to protect us. There was little concern over what rights we lost or crimes we were about to commit.

And so, the blindness and shortsightedness of our government led us to war without evidence of weapons of mass destruction; to disobey The Constitution at Guantanamo Bay; to condone the atrocities committed by BlackWater mercenaries; and accumulate a deficit beyond imagination.

Slinging war money as though it were confetti is only the prelude to our morose economic climate. Undue tax relief complemented by bad loan industry oversight, shady banking procedures, and corporate bailouts doomed Americans without their knowledge. And here we stand, on the verge of collapse. A fall we knew little about.

The new incoming president has many difficulties to overcome, least of these being an open government. Barack Obama has resigned himself to the task, beginning Change.gov, a website dedicated to his administration’s tasks at hand, compiled in a Citizen’s Briefing Book.

But an e-book is just the beginning; the public is thirsty for more than rhetoric. They want honesty. Americans yearn to eliminate backroom, partisan politicking, and hope that the next decision to go to war or expunge previous policies is completed in public and not behind a veil. They want an environmental policy that is as realistic as it is idealistic, fair enough to keep jobs while improving an endangered environment. Americans want a government that will support them when health concerns arise rather than seek the political donations from the pharmaceutical industry. They want to feel safe from attacks and not threatened with their liberties. But most of all, Americans want to ascertain where their tax dollars are being spent. They want a government who helps them while accounting for every one of the hard-earned dollars it takes to accomplish that.

President Obama seems ready to the task at hand. He stated, in his inaugural address, “Those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

Our Founders rebelled from a government who failed to bridge a gap between the people and their government, a government who kept them in the dark. Hope and change led an admirable mission to create the American democracy; only open government can relight that mission and make it admirable again.

The Founders Flip-Flopped, Too

The Harrisburg Patriot-News

August 31, 2008

On March 14, 2004, presidential candidate and current Senator John Kerry claimed that he “voted for [a soldier funding proposal in Iraq] before I voted against it.” This boondoggle quickly painted Kerry into a corner, and framed him with the disparaging political term – the “flip-flopper.”

In the 2008 election, the term has become even more pervasive and commonplace. Sen. John McCain has been accused of changing his stance on a laundry list of measures: from his stance on immigration, supporting Pres. Bush’s tax cuts, or encouraging off-shore drilling. Sen. Barack Obama has also been accused of banking a few U-turns, sharing McCain’s off-shore drilling stance, while now supporting FISA and neglecting public financing.

The media’s fascination with tracking these changes of position led me to wonder – were the Founding Fathers flip-floppers?

Unquestionably.

Pres. George Washington was elected to office as a nonpartisan. He in fact promised to avoid partisanship. Yet it was Washington who became the adulation of the Federalist Party and a strong national government. He created a rift with Democratic-Republicans by expelling the French diplomat “Citizen Genet,” who roused Jeffersonian supporters to aid France in their war with Britain. Washington ironically should remain the only president elected without a party because of the partisanship of his own administration.

Thomas Jefferson also belongs to this list. The 18^th century libertarian and a one of the most vocal opponents of nationalized government didn’t hesitate to use his presidential influence to conduct the Louisiana Purchase. This $23 million transaction (approximately 1/3 of the GDP at the time) was a major government expenditure. Many argued that if Federalist John Adams had proposed this measure, Jefferson would have surely opposed it.

Pres. Adams himself turned on his own Federalist Party as they grew hungry for war with France. His administration, creators of the first FISA-like Alien & Sedition Acts, was bent on curbing foreign espionage. They later used this as a vehicle to level the Democratic-Republican Party; yet when Adams stepped in and overturned the Acts as well as the French “Quasi-War,” ironically the only things leveled were his own party and his chances of re-election.

The biggest flip-flopper of all was James Madison. He was the author of more than 1/3 of the Federalist Papers, a 1788 compendium with the sole intention of convincing America to support Federalist policies and to rally around a strong central government. Madison created the binding document that gave birth to such a government. But three years later, the “Father of The Constitution” switched parties and systemically fought for a Bill of Rights to give more power to the individual states and Americans themselves.

Though John Kerry wouldn’t know it, flip-flopping is as American as apple pie. In fact, voters should fear candidates who remain inflexible and rigid on some issues. As our nation grows and we unearth technological, military, and economic shifts in our culture and world, we shouldn’t be measuring the quality of a candidate by merely their first opinions and moral standards but also on their ability to do what’s best for America at any and all times. 

Dollars & Democracy: The 2008 Election Highlights American Excess

Like a credit card bill from hell, first quarter fundraising reports showed an excessive amount of dollars collected for the 2008 presidential candidates. Senator Hillary Clinton leads the soon-to-be spending spree, having raised $36 million through the first three months of her campaign, quadrupling the record amount collected by Al Gore in 1999. Even John Edwards – the third place finisher in the Democratic primary – has eclipsed Gore’s numbers, raising a cool $13 million for his campaign; America still awaits for Barack Obama’s and Republican figures to be disclosed.

It has become safe to assume the 2008 presidential election will be costlier than any election in the history of our world. Spending will, undoubtedly, eclipse the $1 billion mark in this decisive race. Seems like an excessive amount of zeroes for a job that pays $400,000 per year, but it becomes even more extreme when one realizes $1 billion is a higher dollar amount than the entire GDP of 28 nations.

But people like Jonah Goldberg would have you think that this price tag is by no means intolerable. According to his March 28^th article in the Washington Post, “More money means more communication, more debate, more education. In other words, more democracy.”

More money does not mean more communication. More money means more bought votes, more you scratch my back while I throw dollars at yours. Money is to political campaigns what PowerBait is to the first day of fishing – you just have to continuously apply until you get every fish to bite, because they are all hungry. Plus more money usually means more painful, slanderous and repetitive advertisements; not what the Framers would consider a two-way communicative conduit.

Neither does more money mean more debate; it eliminates it. Today we hardly elect the candidate with the best ideas. We elect the candidate who gets our attention, and that usually comes at a price and with many purse strings. According to OpenSecrets.org, we elect the candidate with the biggest checkbook 97% of the time. This causes many deserving candidates to drop out of the race early simply because they cannot keep up with the fundraising. More money means less candidates and less debate.

And to believe that more money equals more education? Considering that 5% of voters elected Bill Clinton in 1992 because he played the saxophone or that 6.25% of voters placed George Bush in office in 2000 because he was a guy they could “sit down and have a beer with,” if we really wanted to educate the voters, we could do it in a much more effective and efficient manner than making signs and barraging them with tasteless, purchased propaganda.

Instead, political races should have a level political playing field. This nation was founded upon equal opportunity, and the current price tag of elections virtually eliminates any hopes of average citizens with great ideas to play in the same arena as the millionaires and billionaires that run the system and the corporations that sponsor them. Watch Bullworth or Man of the Year if you want to laugh at that biting but honest audacity.

Money has not enhanced our democracy, it has squandered it. The only way to solve this is to slowly take it back from campaign donors and pork-barrel spending projects and for every voter to look at their politician like they would their teenager with our national credit card. Call it "American Excess," because that is what money has done to our political system. If we neglect to watch it, recover it, and reinvent it, the great democratic system that was fine-tuned in this country and replicated around the world will not be every where we want it to be.

Rendell Brings Shovel to a Snowball Fight

KeystonePolitics.com, February 12, 2008

As Pennsylvania was blanketed by snow on Tuesday, the thickest “white stuff” was recorded by Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“You’ve got conservative whites [in Pennsylvania],” said Governor Ed Rendell, “who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate.” Rendell continues his charade, saying, while “looking at the returns in my election, that had Lynn Swann been the identical candidate that he was – well-spoken, charismatic, good-looking – but white instead of black, instead of winning by 22 points, I would have won by 17 or so.”

Wow. Did Pennsylvania really elect a man so insensitive, so egotistical, and so naïve?
I have three questions for you, Mr. Rendell:

Don’t you believe you won in the 2006 general election because you were the stronger candidate?

The 2006 Swann campaign was infantile: Swann had political party (our state is slightly Democrat) and fundraising disadvantages (Rendell out-raised Swann 2:1). He was also a non-native Pennsylvanian that had no political experience running against the incumbent governor, who walloped him in every debate because Swann had the policy-handling skills of Humpty Dumpty. Why he lost the election had nothing to do with his skin color. It had to do with Rendell’s ability to work a shovel and Swann’s lack of it.

Second, since you relied upon black and suburbanite voters, never conservative whites, what gives you the right to speak on their behalf?

When gun control and abortion became major wedge issues in the 2002 primary race, Rendell lost every middle county to current Sen. Bob Casey, Jr. In 2006 he lost these counties again, sans a handful. Rendell’s comments not only unearthed James Carville’s description of Pennsylvania (“Pittsburgh to the west, Philadelphia to the east, and Alabama in between”), it attempted to recast the areas (he never carried) as culturally backward, as if the Little Rock Nine, Brown v. Board, and Martin Luther King, Jr. did little to change the mindset of its residents. And as a resident of these areas, it’s offensive.

Lastly, since conservative whites are opposed to label candidates such as the “black” one, why would they support the “woman candidate” – especially one with the last name of Clinton? Or why should they support any candidate you endorse?

Based on profiling, most voters who will disregard Obama will also not vote for Clinton, just as they disregarded Rendell. By pitting the two candidates against each other – and reinforcing the “conservative whites’” distaste for him – our governor is reducing the slight Democratic lead for either winner, whether it’s Obama or Clinton. Instead, the scales tilt toward the moderate and toward the Republican. Advantage: McCain.

At this time next month, the presidential primary will move to Pennsylvania. And, just like cinders spoil a fresh, uncontaminated snowfall, insensitive comments issued by our own governor may have tarnished one of the greatest moments in our state’s electoral history. But then again, the next comment could be even more outrageous, too.