“In the process, he learned one thing: In a nation where roughly 20% describe themselves as liberal, 40% as conservative, and 40% as moderate, there’s not a high price for shutting out the left.”  William McGurn,  Bill Clinton’s Revenge, Wall St.J., Jan 25, 2010 <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703808904575025620428520574.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook>.

Actually, Mr. McGurn understates the pervasiveness of Liberalism’s undoing.  As Mr. McGurn points out, since the days of John F. Kennedy, no Northeastern Liberal has been elected President of the United States.  Only two Democrats have been elected in the almost 50 years since Kennedy’s election, both (other than Pres. Obama) little known Southern Governors, one of them arguably the worst President in American history.

Gallop polls indicate that

“Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.” <http://www.gallup.com/poll/120857/conservatives-single-largest-ideological-group.aspx>.

Thus a bit less than twice as many Americans see themselves as Conservatives than consider themselves Liberal.  Even more importantly, a bit less than 80% of the populace consider themselves to NOT be liberals and this trend has held for nearly 20 years.  A more complete rejection of an ideology is difficult to imagine.

Even more threatening to Liberals, there are now strong new voices in the GOP, such as Rep. Paul Ryan <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703808904575025080017959478.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook> and Rep. Thad McCotter, whose commonsense, workable ideas on economic, regulatory and taxation reform appeal to moderates, who have learned in the last 15 years that, in the words of the great Milton Friedman, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

This is certainly true of government and, as Daniel Henninger wisely pointed out in his essay, The Fall of the House of Kennedy <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015010515688120.html>, the Democratic Party has increasingly become the party of the entrenched bureaucracy, what I have called the Party of the Government, by the Government and for the Government.  Given that the average salary in the private sector is about $35,000 per year (even with all those “evil” entrepreneurs in this census) and the average salary for a Federal employee is $71,000 per year, that plays badly with people who are trying to keep their jobs, their homes and their families feed  in difficult times.

Moreover, the huge amount of money that the Wall Street Banks poured into Pres. Obama’s campaign and the subsequent bailout of AIG, which happened under Pres. Obama’s watch, certainly make ordinary people wonder if the Democrats are alligned with yet another cabal which seeks to batten on the public fisc.

This is brought home by the complete lack of regulatory reform in the last year.

Old style, pre-Reagan “tell people how to breathe” regulation is rightly consigned to the ashcan of history and should not be trotted out.  However, regulation that fosters transparency, puts crime scene tape around patent conflicts of interest (as Glass-Steagle did) and which causes bright, ambitious people to temper enthusiasm with judgement is needed in an advanced commercial society.  More proposals of this type (such as Rep. McCotter’s recent ones) are seen more often on the Right than the Left.

There was a time in American History when a sufficient consensus was reached that there was, in effect, one political party; the “Era of Good Feelings.”  I think we are about to come into such an era now and the Democrats will, like the Federalists, pass into history after what is likely to be an historic rejection in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Of course, a few years after the Era of Good Feelings the Whigs came out of disputes within the Democratic Party and the Republicans ultimately grew out of the Whigs.  But events of that kind are at least a decade in the future.

Dear Rep. Murphy:

Now the current Democrat House and Senate Health Care Reform Plans are dead.  Good.  They were bad Bills and they will not be mourned.

The time has come for “Blue Dog” Democrats to reach across the aisle to Rep. Ryan of 1st Wisconsin and the other sponsors of HR 2520, The Patients’ Choice Act.  This is a workable plan that is far cheaper, better thought out and more effective than the current failed proposals.

HR 2520 does have its drawbacks. The only real savings, for example, from “buying insurance across state lines” comes from being able to avoid expensive, state-law required coverage a consumer does not need. This is only useful in states, like NY, where the health insurance policy “bells and whistles” are laid on with a trowel.  Additionally, many payors will not have a provider panel in every state, possibly making it functionally impossible for this idea to produce any real reduced cost or increased competition in many parts of the Country.  

However, the ideas for “Association Plans” in HR 2520, that would let individuals and small businesses join Plans run by not-for-profits like the Chamber of Commerce, seem like an effective way to get both government and employers out of the business of buying or providing health insurance, something which neither does well or cheaply.

The State-level Exchanges proposed in the Democrats’ House and Senate Plans seemed to have all the charm of the IRS and all the efficiency of the DMV.  

In contrast, the Association Plans would enable something like the USAA model from auto insurance to be applied to health insurance, increasing quality, reducing cost and expanding access.  This is not dissimilar to the Professional Employees Organization (‘PEO”) you belonged to in order to provide health insurance for your small business, per our conversation at your Town Hall on August 7, 2009  at Granville.

Additionally, such Association Plans would make it much easier to spread risk, as Employment-based plans do, which would enable payors to expand coverage of people with pre-existing conditions.  In contrast, New York State adopted similar protections to those in the Democrat House and Senate Bills  for people with pre-existing conditions in the individual insurance market with Cuomo-era reforms to the NYS Insurance Law. These changes have reduced the number of New Yorkers covered by individual; non-employment based policies here, while that number has increased nation-wide.  

Further, HR 2520 would expand the use of Health Savings Accounts (“HSAs”), a concept you have said you favor.  This would allow people to “shop around” for the kinds of medical services where lay people can effectively shop based on price, such as routine checkups.  One of the real problems with the HR 3200 was that it made such routine care cost-transparent to patients by barring co-pays.  There is no cost savings to be had in making comparison shopping irrelevant to patients where they could do so, as opposed to areas like cardiac by-pass or cancer treatment, where this is more difficult even in the age of Web-MD.

While you are a fairly new member of Congress, Sen. Brown’s election shows what an impact one new member can have.  If you are able to do this, you will further demonstrate that you understand the heart-felt beliefs of your constituents in the NY 20thDistrict in limited and cost-effective government.  

This is something that would certainly benefit your career, given the national mood as demonstrated by Sen. Brown’s election.  As the great Rabbi Hillel said, “If not me, who?  If not now, when?”

I remain

Respectfully, John Minehan

Prior to the Fall of 2008, there were Red States and Blue States.  After the on-going economic crisis that began in September of 2008 and the Bush and Obama Administrations’ failure to respond effectively, we have become a Read Nation.

We have read the Constitution and the writings of the Framers and have embraced Federalism and rejected centralization and bureaucracy.  We have read The Wealth of Nations and have rejected the ideas of Marx.  We have read Friedman and have rejected Keynes.

We know we are a nation of free man, free markets and free pulpits.  We embrace freedom (and its natural concomitant, responsibility) and reject a  security that comes at the expense of economic choice and consequence, of risk and reward.

The Democratic Party will likely be shattered as a national party by the 2010 elections, much as the Federalists were by the election of 1800, the Health Care Bill a modern version of the Alien and Sedition Act.  Some say this has happened before: in 1980; 1994; 2000; 2002; and 2004, but the Democratic Party survived.  I say that because this has happened so many times  before, the Democratic Party of centralized federal power for its own sake is clearly a dead letter with the American people.

The Republican Party of George W.Bush and “National Greatness Conservatism” is likewise dead.  However, there a coterie of men and women drawn to conservative and libertarian principals existed to replace the failed structure.

To an extent, The Tea Party movement may have begun as an “AstroTurf Campaign” begun by Republican Party hacks, but it has grown like a weed among liberty-loving Americans, attached to their ancient patrimony of the Constitution, many of them never before involved in politics or activism.

With the death of the Democratic Party as a viable national party, as a possible alternative voice, we need to create a Liberalism for the 21st Century.  This would be a Liberalism rooted in the Constitution and Federalism and in the tradition of the voluntary not-for-profit organization, what management gaon Peter Drucker called the “Social Sector.”

What would such a liberalism look like?  Perhaps this is an answer:

1. If the 20th Century, from Lochner, through Griswold to Roe v. Wade, was the century of the Civil War Amendments, the 21st should be the Century of the Tenth Amendment.

2.  The great, looming realities of the 21st Century are: 1) we will have to compete for foreign capital with everyone else; and 2) we will have a less affluent population and a slower rate of growth.  Ever see those commercials for investment in Macedonia on Fox and CNBC?  They are the competition.

3.  These two constraints mean: 1) we will have to have to allocate a lower percentage of our GDP to government to attract investment; and 2) we will probably have a shrinking tax base in any event.

4.  There will, however, be needs that will have to be met and investment rarely comes to unstable nation-states or to those without a properly educated work force.

5.  The key to dealing with items 3 and 4 above is the Tenth Amendment.

6.  The Federal Government needs to shrink, performing only its Constitutionally enumerated powers, as Madison believed it should, even though this is not the current state of the law.

7.  Things like Education, properly a State (or, better, a local) function, would be returned to that level and the Federal Education Department could be eliminated.  Something new needs to replace the current model of property-tax-funded, free, universal K-12 public education.  We need as many incubators as possible to develop best practices.

8.  Universal health care could be pursued through legal reform and the establishment of not-for-profit buying cooperatives.  Instead of creating a centralized government bureaucracy like the DMV (or continuing the current employment-based system), Americans should get their health insurance through competing not-for-profit groups (like USAA in Auto Insurance).  The Federal Government, post Iraq and Katrina, does not have the legitimacy to make hard choices in this immensely personal area.

9.  If this proves successful, Social Security and pensions could be privatized on a similar model.

10. National defense is a (perhaps “the”) critical function of government but it does not require continuing to buy weapons for the Cold War.  More money, time and effort need to be given to State and USAID.  The Department of Defense needs to think, not only about the current war(s), but the next.  This would best be done through investing in the development and honing of the Military’s current stable of exceptionally experienced Officers and NCOs.  Why not try to make them all McMasters and Nagles?  GEN Peterus’s exceptional brain trust in Iraq  needs to become the norm, not the exception.

11.  The Troop Program Units (“TPUs”) of the Army and Air Force Reserves should be reassigned to the states.  State National Guards and Militia ought to be capable enough to handle a disaster at the Hurricane Katrina level on their own.  If these forces are deployed in Federal service, there should be Inter-state compacts that handle the issue.  As a result, FEMA should be stood-down, saving money and decentralizing disaster response and recovery.

12.  Returning Education to the States and allowing individuals to come together to solve common problems though voluntary organizations is not only more efficient, it is more resilient, an issue identified by thinkers like Ramo and Robb and William Lind.

Are these the answers?  Perhaps, but far more important is replacing old ideas that have proven time and again to be failures that are antithetical to human liberty.  For Liberals and Progressives, it is time to throw away the failed and embrace the proven and workable, to trust the people instead of trying to coddle them.  The time has come, in sum, to think.

In 2009, the message from the electorate was: “Yes, we can!”  In 2009, the message from the electorate was:  “You haven’t yet!”

Too much can be read into these results.  This is my opinion of what this may mean.

Christe In New Jersey

Jon Corzine isn’t stupid: he was Chairman of Goldman Sachs.  He doesn’t lack heart: he is a former Marine.  However, he really didn’t accomplish much of anything in New Jersey.  Property taxes remain the highest in the nation.  Economic growth is nonexistent and recovery is sluggish, making people who are trying to re-trench financially more conscious of the excessive taxes.

Corzine was distracted as governor.  He was distracted by his recovery from his 2007 auto wreak (while speeding in a state vehicle) and by coverage of his relationship with public sector union lobbyist Carla Katz.  He was involved in a number of failed or embarrassing policy initiatives, like the 2006 Government shutdown and the Dubai ports controversy.  While he was an honest man, indictments of several corrupt New Jersey politicians during his term reminded voters of long standing issues with municipal and public sector union corruption in the state.

Christe, in contrast, was the US Attorney who obtained multiple indictments and convictions in these cases, including Newark’s infamous Sharpe James.  A moderate Republican, he was pushed towards a tax reform message by the Primary challenge of tax reform crusader Steve Lonegan.

Despite the amount of time the President spent in New Jersey campaigning for Corzine, I think this is less a referendum on Pres. Obama than a sign that a Chief Executive perceived as ineffective in a high tax state or locality is at risk.

This was true, not only in New Jersey, but in New York, where long-serving County Executive Andy Spano in Westchester was handily defeated by a republican newcomer.  Out on Long Island, Tom Suozzi has apparently barely survived a challenge as Nassau County Executive.  Orange County, after flirting with the Democrats at the local level for a few years, is back to being rock-ribbed Republican, Reddest of Red Counties.

Since several Blue States in addition to New Jersey (such as Michigan, California and NY) are in this same situation, this may even be a potential threat to the Democrats surviving as a national party.  What happens to a party that controls nothing?  Ask the Federalists and the Whigs.

Virginia

I see this as more of a referendum on Pres. Obama.

He just has not delivered enough on economic issues to keep the extraordinary mandate he received by being the first Democrat to take Virginia since LBJ in 1964.  Additionally, the Virginia Democrats just don’t have a deep bench.

NY 23d

The Conservative candidate lost, but a conservative candidate won.  That is the critical take-away.

Owen is a fiscally conservative former Air Force officer.  He was an ideal candidate for this District, just as Scott Murphy was for the NY 20th.  In contrast, the Republican County Chairs seem not to have gotten the message that this is a conservative district and that, outside of certain catchment areas, NY is a Red State.

The big disadvantage that NY Republicans have in 2010 is their own leadership.  The new state chairman, Cox, may make a real difference.  Sarah Palin and the Tea Party/Patriot movement saw and exploited this opportunity before the “wise men, ” not a great sign for NY Republicans.

What to Do

The Administration needs to pull sharp right, especially on economic issues.  You just can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt, although many households tried back in the “Re-fi Economy.”  (Which may be why average voters know that now.)

Everyone in the Administration needs to read (and understand) these:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703932904574511250528884932.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574499693726128138.html

The Democrats just can’t figure out it is no longer 1932.  A young working man at a political meeting I attended this summer, not a guy you would pick out as politically active, got up and said, “We want freedom, not bullshit.”  Democrats better figure that one out fast.

Think about how to get rid of Pelosi and Reid before Christmas.  They are the death knell to any hope of Democrats keeping Congress in 2010.

Call in Rep. Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich.  Ryan’s health care bills are far better than anything the Democrats have offered and the Administration needs a win.

If the economy recovers, even a bit anemically, a personally popular President can still be re-elected with a wide margin, as Pres, Reagan was in 1984, despite hard times early on.

The Republicans need to push financial responsibility and limited government.  The defeat of gay marriage in Maine shows that the country is socially conservative, but you have more than enough material with the economy, Constitutional overreach by the Federal government and the debt.  (Which are fundamentally related issues.)

Nothing is beyond change at this point, but the Administration better start thinking hard.

“Read Mr. Obama’s speech last week at MIT on climate change: “The folks who pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized.” This, ironically, sounds a lot like the 2007 antiHillary “Big Brother” TV commercial. Its message was that Hillary represented something big and ominously coercive. Boot up that ad now and put Obama’s face where Hillary’s is.The larger point here isn’t necessarily partisan. It’s a description of the way people live their lives in a 21st century world, and how disconnected politics has become from that world.

If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care-a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge.

No chance of that. Our outdated political software can’t recognize trial and error. What ObamaCare is doing with health care-the “public option”-may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it’s starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go. Wait until EPA’s ghost busters start enforcing cap-and-trade.

People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it’s turning out to be just big-box politics.

None of this is to suggest the Republicans are any better. They do, however, have a better chance of breaking out of the ancient political castle. So long as the Democratic Party is the party of the Old Hat People, dependent on public-sector unions with Orwellian names like the Service Employees International Union, it will remain yoked to a pre-iPhone political model that will increasingly strike average everyday American voters as weird and alien to their world.”  Daniel Henninger, Obama and the Old Hat People, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 29, 2009 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574499693726128138.html).

The simple (and sad) fact is that Liberals, and the Democratic Party in general, have not had a new, or even workable idea, since the Johnson Administration.

We propose a bloated, bureaucratic health care “public option” and talk about government exchanges (like the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program [FEHBP"], about which you have talked with some dismay) offering “choice,” ignoring the fact that the chief source of quality, lower cost and expanded access is the entrepreneurial spirit and consumer demand.  Indeed, why not “an iPhone for health care-a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs?”

We tax people to death, even past their death, and wonder why the savings rate is horrible and there is a great deal of debt and why little wealth created.  We bail out failed companies that are “too big to fail,” borrow huge sums from China and wonder why entrepreneurs don’t save us.

Rep.  Murphy, you were a small businessman.  You created wealth and saw the power of free markets.

You have to know what could be done if we unleash the power of innovation and risk taking, if we cut away red tape and let people keep their money.  You have to understand, in a way a career politician can’t, that every dollar the government takes in taxes is a dollar that can’t be used by an entrepreneur to start a business; by a small business owner to hire someone; or by a worker to buy a Christmas Present for a beloved spouse or child.

Doug Hoffman is going to win tomorrow, likely by a large margin, a sign that New York (or at least large swaths of it) is a far less Blue State than many people think.  Frankly, this creates a risk for your re-election.  It also creates an opportunity to be the voice of entrepreneurial capitalism in the Democratic caucus.  It gives you an incentive to reach out to people on the Republican side, like Rep. Paul Ryan of the 1st Wisconsin, who have good, innovative, workable ideas on health care reform that could lead us to market-based reform.

The sage Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”  The time is now.  The task is great.  The risk is vast.  But the deed is great and critical. As Camus asked the Dominicans, “And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”

On Tuesday, Nov. 3d, four people will seek the mayor’s office in Albany, NY: Jerry Jennings; the incumbent mayor, a Democrat; Corey Ellis, the Working Families Party Candidate; Valerie Faust, a Democrat seeking write in votes and Republican Nathan Lebron.  For the following reasons, Mr. Lebron is the best, in most ways the only, choice.

Mayor Jennings

Mayor Jerry Jennings’s progression from T-shirt and leather jacket wearing, progressive city council member to expensive suit wearing and perpetually tanned Machine Mayor illustrates the Who’s famous lyric: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

About the only thing that has stayed the same since 1993 are the mistakes that Mayor Jennings makes.

Albany’s Equalization Rate (the ratio of assessed property value to actual property value) has swung violently since Mr. Jennings took office, reaching 101.3% in 2008. (http://www.orps.state.ny.us/cfapps/MuniPro/muni_theme/muni/ratehistory.cfm?swis=010100&dom_sw=010100)
While this is not as bad as Schenectady’s problems in this area between 1992 and 1998 (http://www.orps.state.ny.us/cfapps/MuniPro/muni_theme/muni/ratehistory.cfm?swis=010100&dom_sw=010100), it contrasts poorly with the consistent equalization rates enjoyed by Poughkeepsie since 2006 (http://www.orps.state.ny.us/cfapps/MuniPro/muni_theme/muni/ratehistory.cfm?swis=131300&dom_sw=131300) or the larger Rochester, relatively stable since the late 1990s (http://www.orps.state.ny.us/cfapps/MuniPro/muni_theme/muni/ratehistory.cfm?swis=261400&dom_sw=261400).  Like Albany, both Poughkeepsie and Rochester have a great deal of tax-exempt property.

Additionally, the kind of problems with parking enforcement that have generated a recent scandal were the subject of criticism by the office of the State Comptroller as far back as 1997. (http://www.albanyny.org/_files/FinalReportrevised8309.pdf)
In short, the value of experience in Mayor Jennings case is under cut by a patent inability to learn from that experience.

Corey Ellis

Mr. Ellis is an honest and capable man. He did better against Mayor Jennings, with 44% of the vote, than any other recent primary challenger.

However, he is the candidate of the Working Families Party, at a time when a recent scandal involving the Working Families Party in Troy (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/20/tried-steal-election-ny-voter-fraud-case-heats/) may discourage more conservative Democrats and Independents who have grown opposed to Mayor Jennings (as well as Republicans) from crossing over and voting for him. Additionally, despite a lot of time, money and effort put into the Primary (leaving little of any of these for the general election) by the Working Families Party, Mr. Ellis lost the Primary, likely his best chance to take the office.

Valerie Faust

Ms. Faust, judging from the number of lawn signs, has drawn a great deal of interest. However, it is far easier to put up a lawn sign than to vote for a write-in candidate in a New York State election.

Nathan Lebron

While campaigning for Mr. Lebron, I have noticed a great deal of disaffection toward Mayor Jennings on the party of rock-ribbed Machine Democrats, the kind of people who send their children to CBA and Bishop Maginn and who go to Mass every week, who have probably voted for the Machine candidate most of their lives.

Will they come over to Mr. Ellis? Although Mr. Ellis is one of them, Albany-born-and-breed, life-long Democrat, graduate of Maginn and Fordham, I doubt it. They did not flock to him in the Primary. They are not the type of people who will generally vote on the Working Families line, especially where the scandal in Troy is getting national attention on Fox News. (This is regrettable, as Mr. Ellis and the Albany Working Families leadership have nothing to do with these issues, but as with many things in life, it is a matter of timing.)

They may vote for Ms. Faust, she has generated a plethora of lawn signs, but the mechanics of write-in candidates in New York State are, probably intentionally, difficult.

This leaves Mr. Lebron, a conservative, low taxes Republican, who arrived at these political views through a curriculum vitae that includes:

1) surviving childhood cancer that left him with a pronounced and permanent limp;

2) growing up in the South Bronx and becoming an IT Consultant in Albany; and

3) an academic career that started in a high school in the South Bronx with a jail cell in the basement and culminated (to date) in a master’s degree from Harvard in Information Systems.

Clearly, he is not your typical Country Club Republican.

While he lacks experience in elective office (probably no disadvantage in Albany, world capital of entrenched incumbency), he has extensive experience, as a consultant, in getting people to buy into his ideas.

This is both the stock in trade of consultants and the heart of politics. As an IT consultant, as opposed to consultants in other areas, his ideas either work or they don’t: the program either runs or it doesn’t; the hardware either performs or its doesn’t. The fact that he is successful is proof that he is not only a man who can sell his ideas but a man who has has good ideas in the first place.

Unlike Mayor Jennings, who was an assistant school principal, or Mr. Ellis, who was a union organizer, Mr. Lebron is a businessman. He has profit and loss responsibility. He hires and fires.  He has been accountable for his ideas and his actions and has held others accountable.  His particular area of endeavor involves making his clients more effective and efficient, leveraging information.

Given these facts, which of these men are more capable of finding waste, fraud and abuse in the City budget?  Which of them is most likely to be willing to make such necessary cuts? Which of these men will help the School Board stand up to the Teacher’s Union? Which of these men is more likely to make Albany’s 19th Century City Government more responsive to the People, both individually and as neighborhoods?

You may say, while most conservatives are not likely to vote for Mr. Ellis, most Progressives will not vote for Mr. Lebron. However, it is in their interest to elect Mr. Lebron.

Mayor Jennings, as mentioned above, started as a Progressive. Over time, he buckled under the weight of Democratic Machine that has ruled Albany since 1922. The Machine has a life of its own, the long, living shadow (still wearing a hat and clutching a fighting roster) of Dan O’Connell. If, however, the Machine were to be replaced by a Republican Administration, this might be a new beginning for both Republicans and Progressives: a rebirth of political choice.

While Mr. Ellis is a different man than Mayor Jennings, dismantling the Machine first might be to his lasting political advantage, especially if such a Republican Administration were led by a man, like Mr. Lebron,  who is committed to term limits.

Conclusion

In sum, there is really only one choice for Republicans and Democrats, for Conservatives and Progressives. That choice is Natnan Lebron, mayor for all these reasons.

Most people remember 1968, those who remember it at all, as an ill-stared and ominous year. It was the year of Tet; the siege of Khe Sahn; the decision of Lyndon Baines Johnson (“LBJ”) not to seek a second full term; the bracketed assassinations of Dr. King and Senator Kennedy; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ending the “Prague Spring;” the Chicago Democratic Convention; and the election of Richard M. Nixon (“RMN”).

However, 1969 may have been an even more ominous year.

In many ways it was a year of absence. John F. Kennedy (“JFK”) and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy (“RFK”), had been prematurely removed from the scene and their absence was palpable. During LBJ’s Administration, we had a direct successor, served by many of the same advisers, at least for awhile. By the time of RMN’s inauguration in January, there was no connection to a martyred President, except the issues.

In Space, in Vietnam and on a bridge in a place called Chappaquiddick, those issues would persist.

RMN came to office. Many people tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Truman had, in recent memory, “risen to the Office.” However, I still remember my mother saying that after JFK, no one ever seemed to deserve Hail to the Chief being played for them again.

People tried to get comfortable with RMN, but it never seemed that he ever became comfortable with himself. Many people who knew RMN personally said he was a very different man in person than he was perceived: persuasive and genuine. Yet somehow, the TV Camera seemed to pick up on all of RMN’s self doubt, all of his artifice, and laid it bare. Despite ending the Vietnam War, opening China, domestic successes like OSHA and a landslide victory in 1972, the collapse of the Nixon presidency over the next 5 years would try the nation’s faith in its institutions. Quite a lot for a poor Quaker boy from Whittier to have done, although somehow more reflective of an inner darkness than an “Inner Light.”

Some of the unfinished business of the Kennedy years was positive. In 1969, America would fulfill one of his commitments.

At the end of 1968 and the beginning of 1969, an Apollo mission orbited the Moon. In July, Astronauts would land on the Moon for the first time, fulfilling JFK’s commitment to land on the moon by the end of the decade. Out of this would come Neil Armstrong’s famous statement: “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind,” which was written for him as “One small step for a man,” but you can understand him blowing his lines. Also out of this would come the iconic photo of the Earth as seen from the Moon, reminding us how small (and concomitantly fragile) our world is.

This was a good time to be young. In the spring, the first mission deploying the Lunar Exploration Module (“LEM”) took place. To me, it looked more like some thing out of Star Trek; like the alien ship from The Tholian Web episode, than something out of Lost in Space, which was set in the distant, but closer, year 1997. Of course, with its landing legs deployed, the LEM looked much like a less streamlined version of the Space Pod from Lost in Space. Cheesy science fiction come to life: what more could you ask for?

Yet, here too was darkness. Years later, the late Bill Safire would reveal that he wrote a speech for RMN to give in the event the mission failed, which was deemed likely. The other detail he revealed was that the first step that would have been taken, when it was clear that we could not get the crew of The Eagle back, was that the cameras would have been shut off: yet another victory for artifice over truth.

For all of that however, the Moon landing brought us together. It made us proud to be Americans. Vietnam did neither.

My major memory of the Spring of that year, along with doing chores and flying kites with my father, was Hamburger Hill.

The fight over Ap Bia Mountain between NVA and US Forces in the rugged A Shau Valley demonstrates that many recent histories of the War, such as Lewis Sorely’s A Better War, that claim that a sea change occurred when GEN Creighton W. Abrams was COMUSMAC-V are somewhat overstated. While GEN Abrams almost certainly saved the Army after Vietnam as Chief of Staff (and I would later serve on a number of occasions under his capable son GEN [Ret.] John Abrams), much of what was wrong, like pitched battles for terrain that could not be held, none the less continued. My teacher that year had a son in 1st CAV. You would be hard pressed to tell her that things were getting better that year.  As Kurt Vonnegut said in his 1969 book Slaughterhouse 5: “So it goes.”

Shortly after the high of the Moon landing in July came two very dark lows.

The first was Chappaquiddick, where a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne and the ambitions for higher office of Edward Moore Kennedy both fell victim to a decent man’s alcoholism and survivor’s guilt. Ted Kennedy lived a bit more than 40 years beyond that day, but a part of him died then. My mother, as Catholics do for the dead, prayed for both Mary Jo Kopechne and Ted Kennedy for many years. In a sense, for many people, hope for a bright future that we would be led to by honest and charismatic men died that day, too.

Even worse were the Tate-Lo Bianco murders.

It’s odd that, more than 40 years later, Roman Polanski is again in the news, this time as a result of a crime he later committed. Unlike O.J. Simpson, Polanski and his father-in law, a retired Army Counter-intelligence Colonel, actually investigated the Tate-LoBianco murders, using Polanski’s knowledge of the LA demimonde and COL (Ret.) Tate’s knowledge of how to conduct investigations and his analytic skill. In fiction, such actions by the believed kin of a murder victim would either solve the crime or would hinder the investigation. In reality, what they learned resulted in some small but usable leads that were somewhat helpful in developing the official investigation that finally closed in on the Manson family.

From what has been written of him, Polanski, child of the Holocaust and refugee from the Communists, seemed happy, to that point in his life, only during his time with Sharon Tate. That his happiness was ended by violence, or that such a famous and successful man was haunted by violence and tragedy seemed to be one of the themes of 1969. We were all learning, like the protagonist of Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown, that the world was darker than we thought. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Soon after, the murders were discovered, however, America’s youth gave it reason to be proud.

At Woodstock, hundreds of thousands of young people came together without violence and with only a few accidents (but with, it should be noted, some famously bad brown acid, immortalized by the eponymous documentary).

I talked to a fellow once, a Registered Nurse who wrote a book about the Medical aspects of the event, who told me that only one person was run over by a vehicle. You could not run a military operation of that size, with NCOs supervising and sleeping areas marked off with engineer tape and chemical lights (and presumably everyone sober) without more losses than that.

While Woodstock was going on, my father and I were working on the front porch of the house. People kept driving up and asking directions to the festival. Oddly, we lived about 60 miles north and on a side-street.  While the festival goers were clearly committed to peace, love and understanding, many were clearly not well oriented to time, place and event.

On November 3, 1969, RMN made his “Silent Majority” speech. Written by the late Bill Safire and the ubiquitous Pat Buchanan, it set the tone (unfortunately) for what now passes as political discourse the United States. Spiro T. Agnew, formerly a moderate, if secretly and genially corrupt, Maryland governor became the point man (“Nattering Nabobs of Negativism”). RMN and his circle were aware that people were not warming to him and they wanted to find support. Instead, providing more heat than light, they breed discord, which continues to this day.  To this day, politicians have not learned that it is a fool’s errand to do battle with those who buy ink by the barrel.

On December 6, 1969, the sixties died along with an armed young man, Meredith Hunter, killed by a Hell’s Angel, who perceived Hunter as threatening him while the Stones played “Under My Thumb” at a faux-Woodstock free concert in Altamont, California. The Hell’s Angels had been asked to watch the stage and the generators during the concert.

The shooting was legally justifiable, tragic and epitomized the times.  It happened as it was getting darker and colder at the Altamont Speedway.  It was getting darker and colder in America as well as 1969 came to a close.

Unlike the young man, the Sixties were not mourned.  ”So it goes.”

The late State Senator D. Clinton Dominick was hardly a wild eyed radical back in 1970.

He was an eminent lawyer, a product of Columbia Law.  He had served as a Republican in both the Assembly and the State Senate.  He was a WW II veteran, who rose to the rank of Colonel in the Army Reserve.  In later years, he would teach history and political science as a revered adjunct professor at Mount Saint Mary’s College, an institution in the Catholic tradition.  He was, of all things conservative, a VMI graduate of the class of 1940.

In 1970, however, he sponsored a liberalized abortion bill in the State Senate.  As a result, he was targeted by the New York State Conservative Party.

The Conservative Party, started in 1962 as a reaction to liberal “Rockefeller Republicanism,” had its last moment of notoriety prior to its efforts against State Senator Dominick in the quixotic 1965 campaign by William F. Buckley for Mayor of New York.  The Conservative Party campaigned against Mr. Dominick with enough fervor that he lost the Republican Primary to a more conservative opponent.

However, despite George Pataki’s rhetoric in the 1994 election and some minor efforts, such as restoring the Death Penalty (briefly) and Worker’s Compensation reform, he governed like a big spending, Rockefeller Republican for most of 12 years.  The republican Party in NYS, for the most part, was anything but conservative.

Now, however, in Doug Hoffman’s campaign for US Representative for the 23d New York, the Conservative Party may be heard from today, to paraphrase LTG Thomas J. Jackson’s famous comment about State Senator Dominick’s undergraduate school.

Doug Hoffman is painfully nondescript.  He has a presentation, based on his appearance on the Mark Levin and Glenn Beck radio programs, that goes beyond “reserved” to approach “somnolent” or “medicated.”  Even for a Certified Public Accountant (“CPA”), hardly a flashy profession, he comes off as bland, but the electorate has learned not to associate eloquence with competence or experience.

Doug Hoffman is an archetype for major political change.  Hoffman is a citizen politician, a CPA who built a multi-office practice in an economically depressed area.  He, his wife and his children also started 13 other small businesses, in order to enable his children and grandchildren to stay in the area, rather than fleeing it to find greater professional and economic opportunity elsewhere.

Doug Hoffman innately understands the chilling effect that NYS’s high taxes and excessive regulations have on small business people.  Not only is he a small business man, but he is the patriarch of a family of small business people and a trusted adviser to small business people in his community as part of his professional endeavors.

While the Administration may talk about the importance of small businesses to the economy, Doug Hoffman has lived it.  He will bring an accountant’s exactness and rigor, if elected, to the people’s business.  This is the kind of candidate the Republicans in this State should seek if they wish to win the Statewide Offices, the Congressional Delegation and the State Legislature in 2010.

In contrast, the current Republican nominee for the position is a career Rockefeller Republican liberal politician, who has been endorsed by the Daily Kos.  While she would be a fine Democratic Party nominee, she is a poor standard barer for the Republican Party, especially for this conservative, heartland district.

This serves to demonstrate just how woefully out of touch the State Republican Party is.  Perhaps, the Patriot/Liberty movement, which grows ever stronger in a state that is very conservative outside a handful of population centers, would be wise to join their movement to the NYS Conservative Party.