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First, I want to apologize if I run a little short here tonight. I'm used to writing newspaper columns, which are about 800 words long. Like most people, I speak at about 200 words per minute. So in just four minutes, I've used up a day's work.
As a history buff, I looked for some political connection between Montrose and Salida. We were once linked by a narrow-gauge railroad that crossed Marshall Pass and climbed out of the Black Canyon at Cimarron. In September of 1909 President William Howard Taft rode that train from Salida to Montrose so he could dedicate the Gunnison-Uncompaghre Tunnel.
I don't know about his reception here, but at the time, the Salida newspaper was being edited by a Democrat. President Taft weight 310 pounds, and an editorial wondered if the little narrow-gauge locomotives could get the President over the Divide.
Also, I want to point out that I'm not a real good Democrat. Granted, I'm economically challenged and I have to work for a living, so I have some qualifications. But on the other hand, I am a landlord, and I do veer from the party line on school vouchers. I think they would improve our public schools, and here's why.
For about a decade, I went to every meeting of our local
school board. In fact, I had a better attendance record
than most board members. And at least half of those
meetings, there was a fundamentalist in there complaining
about the science textbooks, or that his precious child had
to read Macbeth,
and even if it was Shakespeare, it
was promoting belief in the occult. And if it wasn't
Macbeth, it was some other book.
As it is, we have to listen to these people. If we had
vouchers, we could run good public schools that taught real
science and real literature, and if a parent complained, we
could tell him Take your money and go down the street,
and never bother us again.
In other words, with
vouchers we could eliminate a bad influence from our public
schools.
So think about that, and I'll move to some other topics.
The other day I was at our public library, looking over the new books shelf, when I saw How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) by Ann Coulter. Now, I'm getting to an age where I have to be mindful of my blood pressure, so I didn't check it out, let alone try to read it.
But the title did give me an idea for my talk here: we could call this How to Talk to Republicans -- And We Must. After all, in rural Colorado, you have to deal with Republicans unless you've figured out the total hermit's life so far off the grid that don't even have a Social Security number. Or, as the saying goes, so deep in the woods that they have to pipe in sunshine.
Republicans sell us gasoline and groceries, own the newspapers, control the federal government that controls most of our territory -- some of them probably even live next door. In other words, you're not going to have much of a social or economic life if you don't talk to Republicans. By and large, the backwaters of Colorado are the reddest zone in a red state.
So we don't have much choice about talking to Republicans. But how can we talk to Republicans about topics that matter to all of us? And more importantly, how can we convince them that they shouldn't be Republicans?
For starters, we have to realize that they speak a
different dialect. We are part of the Democratic Party;
they want to call it the Democrat Party. We refer to Air
Pollution,
they call it the clear skies
initiative.
We call it shafting the poor,
they
call it Bankruptcy Reform.
We call it the Estate
Tax,
they call it the Death Tax.
We call it
clearcutting,
they call it the Healthy Forests
Initiative.
We call it an unfunded federal
mandate,
they call it No Child Left Behind.
We
call it Tom Delay,
they call it ethics in
government.
We call it corporate journalism,
they call it the biased liberal media.
You get the idea. But you don't just have to get that idea, you have to keep it in mind whenever you're talking to a Republican. Don't let them get away with using their dialect.
For example, when your Republican neighbor uses the
talking points that the Republican National Committee sent
by email, he'll say something like this around April 15:
Thanks to President Bush and Republicans in Congress, we
can celebrate because we are keeping more of our own money.
But that could change if liberal Democrats regain control
of Congress in the 2006 mid-term elections and roll back
President Bush's tax relief measures. With some of these
tax cuts set to expire in a few years, we cannot allow the
Democrats to run out the clock and raise taxes on every
taxpayer!
The proper response is Will my grandchildren enjoy
paying off all this debt you guys are running up becuase
you're a bunch of live-for-today hedonists who take no
thought of the morrow?
In other words, it's time we put them on the moral defensive. Let them do the explaining.
Out here, the major issue is probably guns. The great
Democratic strategist James Carville put it like this:
The Democratic candidate comes through and says the
Republicans are going to take away your jobs. The
Republican comes through and says the Democrat will take
away your guns. This leaves these guys with an awful
decision to make about which means more to them.
We've got to find a way to tell people that you can
keep your gun and your job by voting for Democrats.
That might be hard, given the propensities of some urban Democrats when it comes to guns. But we can point out that the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee is none other than Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, and he received the National Rifle Association's endorsement every one of the eight times he ran for office in Vermont.
I might also note that Vermont is the only state in the
country without any laws against carrying concealed
weapons. This shocked one of my friends who's a life-time
NRA member. He was standing in line at a convenience store
in the Granite State, right behind a sweet little old lady
trying to fetch change from her purse for a pack of
cigarettes. Eventually she dumped her purse on the counter,
and out rolled a derringer. Nobody thought anything of
it,
he told me, except for me -- I was darn near in
shock.
By contrast to Gov. Dean on guns, there is Ken Mehlman. Never heard of him? He's the chairman of the Republican National Committee. He has never held elective office, so we have no idea where he stands on gun issues. I will note that he has worked in Washington, D.C., for several years, a city which has some of the strongest (and most useless) gun-control laws in the country, and there is no record that he has ever raised his voice against them.
So, when Republicans start grumbling that Democrats want to take away their guns, tell them what you know about Howard Dean, and ask them if they can tell you Ken Mehlman's position. That's how you should talk to a Republican about gun laws. Let them defend Mehlman, whoever he is. We know who Howard Dean is and where he stands on this issue.
The next hot Republican topic is Gay Marriage. They're always telling me that it's important to defend Traditional Marriage. However, they've never told me just how the gay couple living down the street threatens my own marriage of 35 years. Will my children become bastards? Will Martha and I be forced to separate? Will our community property and joint accounts get divided? I don't think so, and yet they keep telling me it's a threat.
Now, my own view is that we ought to take the separation of church and state seriously. And I hear from Republicans that marriage is a sacrament. Different churches have different sacraments, of course, but the sacraments include services like baptism and ordination. Thanks to our wonderful First Amendment, the government does not tell a church whom it can baptize or ordain.
And if marriage is also a sacrament, then what business is it of the government's? Our Republican friends are always telling us that they're in favor of a smaller, less-intrusive government -- and here's a good place to start. Let's abolish marriage as a state institution, and set up civil unions instead. Marriage will, of course, remain as a religious sacrament, and we can leave it to the churches to decide who can marry within their congregations. They do a fine job now with baptism and ordination, and I'm sure they'll be just as capable of handling their marriages.
There are other ways to talk to Republicans about marriage. You could point out that the first divorced president, one who must have set a bad example with his failure to stay until death did them part, was a Republican named Ronald Reagan. Or that that great Republican theorist and strategist, Newt Gingrich, is now on his third marriage, as best as I could count.
Or you could observe that adultery, rather than gay couples, seems to be the major threat to Traditional Marriages, and that it was a Republican governor and a Republican legislature that pretty much legalized adultery in Colorado back in 1972. To be technically correct here, they didn't exactly legalize it, for the left the definition on the books -- it's just that the removed any penalty for violating the law. Talk about being soft on crime -- let a Republican explain that one away.
Let's move on and talk about the Inheritance Tax -- the one they call the Death Tax. They're wrong, of course; it's a tax on estates, not on death. They say it's unfair for someone to have built up a fortune, and then be unable to pass it on to his children. A few minutes later, they'll tell us how important it is for people to work hard and rise by their own efforts -- as opposed, perhaps, to getting a trust fund that was even bigger because there were no inheritance taxes?
Anyway, all you have to do is look up what a Republican president said about inheritance taxes:
The absence of effective state, and, especially,
national, restraint upon unfair money getting has tended to
create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically
powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase
their power. The prime need is to change the conditions
which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not
for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.
We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power
and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the
welfare of his fellows.
We should permit it to be gained only so long as the
gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know,
implies a policy of a far more active governmental
interference with social and economic conditions in this
country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to
face the fact that such an increase in governmental control
is now necessary.
No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has
been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent
a dollar's worth of service rendered -- not gambling in
stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the
swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires
qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in
degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small
means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on
big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily
collected and far more effective -- a graduated inheritance
tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion
and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the
estate.
That pretty well covers this territory, and Theodore Roosevelt said it in 1910. There's no harm in quoting Republicans to Republicans who have forgotten their heritage.
There's another Republican heritage that they tend to
forget. Often they accuse us Democrats of being social
engineers,
especially in regard to highways,
development patterns, and the like. Every time there's a
new urbanism
development proposed -- that is,
something that doesn't require every resident to drive at
least 50 miles a day -- the GOP critics call it social
engineering.
Yet the Republican Party successfully performed some social engineering on a continental scale. I'm rather glad they did, but I wish they'd take credit for it.
To see how it worked, we need to go back to about 1850.
Back then, our nation had just conquered a big chunk of
Mexico. One young Army lieutenant, later to become a
Republican president, called a conspiracy to acquire
territory out of which slave states might be formed for the
American union.
How to respond to the conspiracy that Ulysses S. Grant saw? There was a bitter dispute about how to organize that territory.
The Democratic Party of the era was dominated by the
Slave Power.
The secretary of war in the Franklin
Pierce administration, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi,
commissioned railroad surveys to tie the territory to a
southern city like Memphis, St. Louis or New Orleans. He
even imported camels for transport along southern desert
routes to the West Coast. That vision for the land involved
big plantations and slaves.
The Whig Party tried to avoid dealing with the issue,
and so there arose the Republican Party after the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, with the organizing principle
of no expansion of slavery to the territories.
But the GOP had its own plans for the land: Fill it with small freehold farms that didn't need slaves. Build a railroad to haul crops out and machinery in. Create colleges to teach residents how to get the most from their land. Organize the territory that way, and it would have a Republican population.
This vision came to pass in the U.S. Congress of 1862 with the passage of the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroad Act and the Morrill Act for land-grant colleges. Our West was organized on Republican principles to be populated by people who would vote Republican. That's social engineering on a continental scale, and it's a great Republican success story. The party's orators ought to be proud.
So, when your Republican friends start talking about
social engineering,
compliment them on their party's
success at social engineering in the 1860s. Point out that
we still believe in using the political system to encourage
a society that esteems small farms, public transportation,
and higher education.
Now if we move to current times, we need to consider the Republican Party in Colorado. The party is quite strong in the south metro area -- from Arapahoe County south to El Paso County. It's a growing area, and any place that specializes in two-acre estates with restrictive covenants near four-lane highways is almost certainly a Republican zone.
So the more population there, the more Colorado Republicans. The catch is that the area relies on a dropping water table. Colorado Republican water policy is to find ways to get more water to the south metro area so it can keep growing.
That may take a while, but in the interim, they can
continue to mine the groundwater for more growth until
there are enough people there to dominate the state
government. Then they can write their own water laws and
start raiding other basins without worrying about concepts
like beneficial use
and prior
appropriation.
That's why it's vital for us to continue opposing trans-basin diversions in Colorado. And if we must talk to Republicans about this, point out that you've listened to the Republicans and you really do oppose big government projects -- that if they really need water down there in Douglas County, let private enterprise do the job. Your Republican friend should understand perfectly.
One place we Democrats seem to get the worst of it is in
the moral issues
debate. The Republicans seem to be
more attuned with religious values, although I can't figure
out why. I spent 18 years in Baptist Sunday Schools,
learning the Bible, and I can't remember any place where
the Bible says something good about rich people, or that
society should be organized for their benefit.
To see what I mean here, let's imagine what we'd read in the New Testament if Jesus had been a Republican:
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a
needle than for a liberal to enter into the kingdom of
heaven.
Judge often and harshly, lest ye be judged.
Then Jesus came upon a woman who had been caught up
in adultery, and a crowd of virtuous men gathered about,
ready to stone her, for such was ordained by the law and
the prophets. `Let him who is most concerned about the
rising rate of out-of-wedlock births to teen-aged mothers
cast the first stone,' he said.
One day on the road to Cana, a scabrous, emaciated
leper was lying in a pit beside the way. He approached
toward Jesus, who said to him, `Come not unto me, for thine
own decadent and abominable life-style hath caused thine
affliction, which is a punishment from Heaven.'
Though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels,
and hath not a good direct-mail list, I am as a sounding
brass or a tinkling cymbal.
When thou prayest, do not go into a closet and shut
the door, but instead thou shouldst utter thy prayers in a
loud voice and before an assembled crowd, as the Pharisees
do.
Then the multitude began to grow restless, for they
were without meat or drink in the heat of the day, and
there were but five loaves and two fishes. `Get me some air
time on our cable network,' Jesus commanded his disciples,
`and soon the contributions will be pouring in.'
Take ye therefore great thought of the morrow and
accumulate your treasures upon earth.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, so that he
may deploy more centurions, for a strong national defense
is beloved and ordained by our father in Heaven.
After the lame man had touched the hem of his garment
and was healed, Jesus said unto him, `Thou owest me twenty
shekels, payable immediately in full or in easy monthly
installments secured by thine first-born, for if I did not
charge thee, it could lead to socialized medicine and the
end of the finest health-care system in the world.'
So when your Republican friends start accusing us Democrats of falling off the straight and narrow, remind them of what the Bible really says about the rich and our obligations to our fellow humans. Jesus didn't talk like a Republican, no matter what George W. Bush says.
Now, as Will Rogers once observed, I don't belong to
any organized political party. I'm a Democrat.
We
disagree on dozens of issues. But the surveys I read say
that one thing that unites Democrats is a belief that we
need national health insurance. But how do we explain this
to our Republican friends?
Well, they're upset about lawsuits -- things like product liability and malpractice. A lot of those suits are filed because people need money to pay their medical bills. If they were assured their treatment would be covered, they wouldn't need to sue. So national health insurance would eliminate thousands of lawsuits.
Our Republican friends say they want a more productive workforce. So do we. And how many people do you know who stay in jobs they hate, jobs that they can't be all that productive in, just to keep their health insurance? If we always had health insurance, then we could work at jobs we cherish and we'd be more productive. The national economy would improve with national health care. And we wouldn't have so many bankruptcies if medical bills weren't an issue.
But our Republican friends don't address that. Instead,
we let them scare us, as with those Harry and Louise
commercials a dozen years ago. I don't want the
government in my medical cabinet,
one said. I don't,
either -- so why aren't those people working to repeal our
moronic drug laws?
Last fall, there were other scary commercials about
universal coverage. If Democratic Sen. John Kerry were
elected president, Washington bureaucrats
would be
in control [of] a government-run health-care plan [with
a] $1.5 trillion price tag.
The sentence fragments
continue: Big government in charge. Not you. Not your
doctor.
In other words, Team Bush will protect us from the awful menace of socialized medicine.
But is it really such a menace? The 2002 edition of one of my favorite reference books, The Statistical Abstract of the United States, has a chapter of international statistics, and the health statistics do not make one proud to be an American.
One chart lists 29 nations, and the percentage of Gross Domestic Product that each spends on health care. The United States is a leader there. We spend 12.9 percent of our GDP on health care -- that's the highest percentage in the world, at least for an industrial democracy.
What do we get for the money? The two major measures of public health are life expectancy (77.3 years in the U.S.) and infant mortality rate, 6.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in the first year of American life.
Some nations spend considerably less, and it shows. Turkey spends only 4.8 percent. Life expectancy is a decent 71.2, but infant mortality is an appalling 47.3. Mexico, with health spending at 5.3 percent, is similar: 71.8 life expectancy, and 25.4 infant mortality.
However, they're exceptions. Great Britain spends only 6.9 percent of its GDP on health care, considerably less than our 12.9 percent. Yet British citizens enjoy a longer slightly longer lifespan, 77.8 as compared to our 77.3, and a lower infant mortality rate, 5.5 rather than our 6.8.
In other words, they spend less and get more. That's also true of many other countries. Icelanders spend 8.7 percent of their GDP on health; they live 2.6 years longer, and only half as many of their babies die before their first birthday.
The Japanese enjoy the world's longest life expectancy, 80.8 years, and their infant mortality rate is only 60 percent of ours. They spend only 7.5 percent of their GDP on health care. Canada spends 9.2 percent of its GDP on health, and Canadians live two years longer we do spending 12.9 percent of our GDP.
Greece is a relatively poor country; its per-capita GDP is only $10,733 as compared to our $35,619. But it has a longer life expectancy and a lower infant mortality rate than we do, and it spends only 8.4 percent of its GDP on health care.
This list could continue for long enough to put you to sleep, but I'll spare you. The point should be clear: We spend more on health care, and get less for our money, than most industrial democracies, from Australia to Switzerland. And the ones who deliver the best value have socialized medicine.
Further, if the current American health care system is
the envy of the world,
why is it that no politician
in Iceland, or Canada, or Britain, or anywhere else has
ever campaigned on the plank of giving his country an
American-style? Don't you think that if it were the envy of
the world, somebody else would want it?
Now, I don't like big government
any more than
the next guy. But if it's a choice between paying $200 a
month more in taxes to big government
for national
health care or $400 a month for big insurance from big
business that will probably find some excuse not to
pay,
then the answer seems fairly simple.
Since big government
can deliver better health
care at a lower cost in other countries, perhaps we should
try improving our health care while saving money.
Suppose we could do as well as Spain, which spends only 7 percent of its GDP on health while getting better results. In that case, Americans would enjoy an extra $588 billion each year that now gets sucked up by health care. That's about $2,100 apiece -- talk about a way to keep more of our hard-earned money in our own pockets.
And if government health care
is so terrible, why
do those who often denounce it, like our president and many
senators and representatives, use their government
health-care plans? They seem to think big government
does a fine job of providing health care to them and their
families. But for some reason, they must toil day and night
to save us from that dreadful fate.
Anyway, a national health care program could easily cost $1.5 trillion. But if we use the international averages, then the same amount of private health care delivered the current American way would cost $2.4 trillion. Isn't it time we got serious about saving money?
Why aren't we forcing the Republicans to try to justify this current expensive and inefficient system? When our Republican friends talk about health care, we should ask them to justify the current system. And we should ask them about saving money, reducing bankruptcies, minimizing litigation, improving productivity, and generally empowering Americans to live better lives.
As I said when I started, out here, we don't have much choice but to talk to Republicans. And now, I hope, you know how to talk to them -- if we do a good job of it, they'll see that the best way to achieve the things they say they believe in is to vote for Democrats.
Thank you, and good night.
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