Search
Page
Blueprint
4 Change
 |
 |
Blueprint for Change
Encourage moderates and centrists to put pressure on the established parties.
Today the Republican Party is busy eating its moderate Republicans alive. Senator Lincoln Chafee was challenged by ultra conservatives because he is a moderate. Several other moderate Republicans are under attack and this is the continuation of a trend that has gone on for well over a decade. On the Democratic side Senator Joe Lieberman recently was defeated by anti-war Democrats.
For lots of reasons today's politics have been particularly unkind to any politician who aims for the middle. This is shocking because fully 75% of American voters consider themselves centrists.
Harry figures he has six years tops in Congress. The next reapportionment will very likely cost Minnesota a congressional seat and in any event Harry's wife Claudia plans to retire soon and go to divinity school. Harry has been looking forward to sharing retirement with her.
Because freshman legislators are vulnerable to senior politicians who know the ropes Harry plans to take a couple pages out of former Governor Jesse Ventura's playbook. Ventura was a lonely figure while Governor - the only representative of his party - and at odds with all 201 Minnesota legislators.
He used his bully pulpit to tree the legislature. His popularity allowed this to happen. Harry hopes to use the public's unhappiness with Congress to keep the Congress on the defensive. As the only "Unity" party candidate he will have considerable freedom to ignore the herding instincts of other partisans.
Rather than be tied to committees and kept busy like a private in the army digging ditches Harry will be free to be a spokesman for moderates everywhere and will network beyond the walls of Congress. During the 2008 elections he will be pointing voters across the nation to the most reasonable and unreasonable congressmen with a view to shoring up the former and upending the later.
Harry knows that the greatest fear any Congressman faces is that of reelection. That's why they build great fortifications out of PAC money to make themselves invulnerable. They have been spectacularly successful. Turnover in the last thirty years has been something on the order of 2 or 3%. Congressmen either retire when they are good and ready or die in office.
In 2008 Harry will be able to point to his own example and help other moderates challenge the least compromising incumbent congressmen.
Can he do it? Its hard to say, but if he proves that he can beat the odds this year he hopes to plant a seed in a hundred congressional districts.
Blunt the anti-democratic affect of congressional seniority.
Seniority has been the single most powerful weapon in Congress for the last century. It stopped civil rights legislation for 75 years. The automatic grant of chairmanships to the most senior members has allowed small men to divert the nation's resources selfishly to a few lucky Congressional Districts whether it was good for the nation as a whole or not.
Harry hopes to collect a small group of congressmen on both sides of the aisle to be a fulcrum to reign in seniority. The Republicans began this process when they took control of Congress in the 1990's by limiting the period of time a senior congressman could be a committee chairman. Harry wants to press to have chairmanships chosen based on merit and through internal elections like those for Party leadership positions.
It may be possible for a small group of centrists to pull off something like this if the House of Representatives is as closely divided as some are now predicting it will be. A similar group of Senators did the same thing this year when the Senate was deadlocked over court nominees. A closely divided House will be strongly under the influence of any small group that is willing to tip the scales one way or the other. Harry plans to push on these scales with all his might.
Additionally, Harry wants to give an impartial body like the Congressional Budget Office more authority to make the kind of local spending decisions that often become wasteful pork barrel spending when left to senior Congressmen.
Help take one small portion of the nation's government away from the Republican Party and remind the nation that liberal is not a four-letter word.
Harry will join the Democratic caucus but he will probably remain an independent through his first term in Congress. Harry feels that the Republicans have lost the right to govern because of their closed mindedness and mindless loyalty to party over the national interest.
Harry has never approved of the Republican penchant for name calling. The notion that the word "liberal" is a dirty word completely neglects its honorable history. To oppose liberalism is to oppose Social Security, Medicare, and scores of agencies that look out after the welfare of workers, the environment and public education. It is to forget that one of the most successful liberals in the White House was Republican Teddy Roosevelt, the man who began our national park system, the income tax, and who was the great "trust buster."
Win representation for the District of Columbia in Congress.
America began its existence with the rallying cry "no taxation without representation." When Washington D.C. was first carved out of George Washington's property no one envisioned a large local population. Indeed for years its only residents hailed from states far away and its slave population.
Those slave populations became free citizens but the Congress, ruled over by Congressmen with the power of seniority, was aghast at the possibility of black D.C. residents electing a black representative.
There are quaint arguments against DC representation but they violate the spirit that animated our own Revolution. Republicans don't want DC to have its own representatives because they would almost certainly be Democrats. Some Democrats object because their state might lose a congressman in the next reapportionment.
Ending slavery was an inconvenience to some people in 1865. Inconvenience is a lousy reason to deprive American Citizens today of the rights our founding fathers fought and died for.
About the picture - In 1971 Harry ran for Vice President of the Mankato State Student Senate. He asked his mother to draw a cartoon of him for a campaign poster. He eventually decided to use another cartoon drawn by a fellow MSC student, Duke Durfee, who has gone on to become a well regarded set designer on Broadway. The cartoon didn't work. Harry lost the election.