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Responsibility
Movement Grows
By John Andrews
7/24/2011
Will
Barack Obama go the way of Jimmy
Carter, and lose reelection after demonstrating weak leadership in a
troubled
economy? A leading purple-state Democrat with a keen nose for the
political
wind signaled last week that he thinks it might happen.
Colorado
Governor John Hickenlooper
told a reporter that despite his nine-point walkover in 2008, the
president
would “have a hard time” winning here right now, because “there’s such
dissatisfaction over people who have been out of work” for months or
even
years.
Though
Hick’s warning wasn’t an
outright prediction of Obama’s defeat, it’s significant because our
state is
widely considered a must-win if he is to hold the White House.
If
voters throw out the incumbent, it
will be as much because of conclusions we the people have reached about
ourselves, as because of anything we conclude about the Democratic
president
and his Republican challenger, whoever that may be.
We’ll
have realized that “consent of
the governed” is a responsibility for each of us, not just a mass wave
swept
along by partisan currents and media gales. Again in 2012, as in 1980
when
Carter was ousted, Americans will have decided it’s grab the steering
wheel or
crash. The leadership reversal we could see next year will simply be
the
culmination of a citizenship resurgence that began a year or two ago.
The
Tea Party movement, consciously
echoing the determined citizens who resisted royal oppression and later
wrote
consent into the Declaration of Independence, is the most potent force
for
reassertion of America’s founding principles since the Reaganauts of
the 1970s
refused to believe our best days were behind us. Its emergence in 2009
answered
my hope, expressed in several 2007 columns, for a responsibility
movement to
challenge both parties and reach beyond them.
The
conscience our self-government has
long lacked is awake again at last. A GOP president taking office in
2013, if
such occurs, would find himself or herself equally under the skeptical
Tea
Party eye as the GOP Congress does now. The new political mandate is to
do the
right thing; not the easy or customary thing, but the right thing and
nothing
less. What a welcome change, and just in time to save ourselves – if we
still
can.
Doing
the right thing by choice, and
then owning the consequences of your choice: that’s personal
responsibility.
There’s no other antidote to the debt candy and the entitlement
addiction
gripping Democrats and Republicans alike. No other antidote to the
fiscal
deficits engulfing state and federal budgets. No other antidote to the
moral
deficit of throwaway marriages, negligent parenting, rigged school
tests,
hacked cell phones.
Deficits
abound, but it’s ultimately
the responsibility deficit that will sink us unless we get a grip. Its
symptoms
are everywhere – in dishonest pension promises, in sanctimonious
politicians
with zippers down, in an Obamacare law that embeds big business and big
labor
with big government, waivers the connected, dehumanizes the patient,
cooks the
books, and calls it reform.
The
American experiment asks a
brilliant, daring question: How much success can freedom produce? The
answer,
for the first two centuries, was an astounding amount. But the 1960s
and ‘70s
revealed a serpent in the garden. We learned that freedom and success
can be
their own worst enemies. Responsibility has to temper and guide them.
History’s
drama turns on our continually forgetting and relearning that.
It
was responsibility reborn in
citizens’ hearts and minds, not mere electoral victories, that turned
twilight
in America after Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations, and stagflation
into
morning in America with booming growth, renewed confidence, and Cold
War
victory.
Another
responsibility movement seems
to be stirring today. It didn’t start in Washington; they never do. The
Washington crowd will either catch on or catch hell. Time is short.
History’s
drama heightens.
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it at Townhall
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