If this is typical of his many previous campaigns it is a wonder that he was ever elected to anything and no wonder that he lost so many races he ran in. More importantly, if this is any indicaion of how he operates then he has no business being a legislative aid in Washington, let alone a senator. His rightful place in the capital could be nothing more than “tourist” if this disappearing act is any indicator. So far it appears that every single candidate is working harder than Mr. Cook despite the fact that every one of them had a headstart.

Having studied the candidate previously I had some idea of my order of preference, but I really enjoyed this debate as it allowed me to really get things sorted out. Here’s my order of preference:

1. Mike Lee – I don’t think that surprises anyone considering I already publicly endorsed him but after hearing him with all the other candidates together I am that much more confident that he should be our Senator come next year.

2. Tim Bridgewater – I really like Tim overall. I think he’d make a decent senator – I just think that Mike would be better at filling the Constitutional duties of a senator.

3. (tie) Laura Bridgewater – she sat in for her husband for the first bit of the debate as he was running late and she had a good grasp of what our next senator should be and do – she’d be a great support to Tim if he were elected.

3. (tie) Sharon Lee – I’ve heard her speak before and believe she is a good support for Mike. I hadn’t thought to rank her among the candidates until I saw Mrs. Bridgewater in her husband’s place among the candidates but I think either of those two spouses would be better than the other candidates.

5. (tie) Bob Bennett – Despite his failings Bennett is not the worst choice available to us in this campaign. Like a typical Washington insider he is so busy viewing everything as “extremely complicated” that he seems to have lost sight of most of the simple facts that should be informing our complicated decisions.

5. (tie) James Williams – I had high hopes for James. I had heard really good things about him from people attending other debates, but after listening to him I am forced to conclude that he is a good and well-intentioned man who is out of his depth politically. Philosophically he has good principles, but I don’t believe that he would be an effective force at representing those principles or the people of Utah.

7. Cherilyn Eagar – I remember being excited about the possibilities when I started investigating her as a candidate, but seeing her in a debate showed her as combative, passionate, and disrespectful. If I wanted someone like that there must be 20 other states I could move to where I would have two such Senators in place already. She argues that having a conservative woman in the Senate would be a powerful thing – I’m sure that’s true, but I’ve already named two other conservative women from Utah who would make better senators.

Holly Richardson writes about Tim Bridgewater’s momentum. When she talks about his fund raising she doesn’t mention that over 80% of it was a loan to himself. Tim likes the coverage (naturally) and the next day he posts her article on his RedState diary. Tim gave all the proper attribution and everything – I’m not trying to accuse him of plagiarism. The day after that Thomas Burr writes that “Holly Richardson is boosting Tim Bridgewater’s campaign” over at RedState. Whether it was an oversight or a calculated move is open for speculation, but the fact is that Holly didn’t promote Tim over at RedState – unless she did so under Tim’s name. Finally, Tim gets to tweet about the article by Thomas Burr which declares how beneficial Holly’s support is.

So with a couple of nudges from Tim this little game of Chinese whispers has produced, with a little invented fact here (Holly promoting Tim on RedState) and a little omitted fact there (Tim providing almost all his own campaign funding), almost a week’s worth of positive coverage.

The point here is not to accuse Tim of anything untoward – it is to illustrate the cycle of coverage growing in a vacuum. Tim did nothing this week (at least nothing to garner more coverage in those articles) and yet he got a four days of positive news from a topic (fund raising numbers) that seemed to have died before Holly’s post.

Last night I finally got to meet Mike Lee in person. I had been looking forward to the opportunity for a number of reasons. As long as I have been interested in this Senate race I have been carefully looking at the many candidates (past and present). Even before Mike entered the race I had met almost every candidate seeking this seat and, despite how promising a few of them initially looked, I had found many that I could not endorse and none that I was comfortable endorsing. In fact, by the time Mike announced his intention to run I was almost ready to support him by default (there was only one other candidate I had not completely ruled out by then).

After meeting Mike last night and talking to him, asking a few questions and listening as he answered the questions of a few other people, I came away knowing that this was a candidate I could endorse as completely and freely as I would endorse myself if I were a candidate for some office. Mike Lee is the right candidate for this position. He has the knowledge and the capacity to fill this office well and he is in the race for the right reasons. In fact, as I talked to him I discovered that he is in the race for the exact same reason that I have been so interested in this race for so long.

My plan now is to go out and do everything I can to make sure that I don’t have to try making another endorsement as the field of candidates is whittled down. I plan to still be cheering Mike on in December.

One statement that someone made was that when the tax on unprepared food was eliminated the stores simply raised their prices accordingly so that the savings went into their pockets rather than taxpayers. That didn’t strike me as accurate, but even if it was accurate it is no excuse to reinstate the tax – the stores would let consumers absorb the taxes on the now higher prices rather than lower the price to accommodate the tax.

Sen. Liljenquist mentioned that people don’t tend to buy luxury items in down economies. When combined with the fact that our expectations fo government tend to increase in down economies I saw why governments tend to grow endlessly – there is generally an inverse relationship between our demand for government services and our ability to pay for them. When times are tough we demand more and politicians do their best to oblige us. When times are good we tend to expand government in areas that were not previously considered crucial by eating into any taxes that exceed our recession-limited budgets. When times become lean again the once-discretionary programs are viewed as essential and demand greater sacrifice from citizens to maintain the programs that would have been considered outrageous in the previous downturn.

From this perspective it makes more sense to favor regressive or at least “fair” tax schemes where those with the least ability to pay also have a vested interest in the tax rates so that they are less likely to get extravagant when times are generally better and so that the tax revenue is generally more stable. It is simply foolish to base our most essential services on revenue sources that are unavailable when the services are crucial.

I’m not trying to argue that luxury goods should be tax-exempt, but if they form the basis of our tax revenue for essential services we will always be in for gut-wrenching decisions whenever their is a dip in our economic outlook.

After the town hall meeting I attended on Wednesday I have been thinking about pension plans generally. The state of Utah is looking at changing their pension offerings for new employees to save the state from future financial ruin. I have seen other companies go through that process already. As a nation we have seen the cost of defined benefit pensions contribute mightily to the downfall of GM and Chrysler as well as having a hand in the struggles throughout the airline industry not so many years ago.

As I thought about all these examples I realized that even a fully funded defined benefit pension program is a gamble for any organization. Employees like the security, but it is an inherently risky proposition to offer such a plan.

I decided to look into the history of pensions and as with so many other systemic problems we face, the problem of widespread pension offerings really took root as a result of a poorly conceived government intervention, namely wage freezes during WWII where companies began exploring new ways to compensate workers besides simply using salary as compensation. Notice that this is also at the root of our dysfunctional employer-dependent health insurance boondoggle. The fact that both of these crippling trends were incubated by government wage interference and nursed along afterward through favored status in our tax policy should be a major red flag against further socialist economic moves by our government – no matter how good it might look now there is bound to be a crippling downside that will rear its ugly head later.

Almost as soon as the meeting was opened up for comments and questions from those in attendance it became very clear that a majority of the people there were public employees who were not very thrilled with the work that Sen. Liljenquist has been doing to change the pension program for state employees. They expressed their disappointment with the directions he was going and their concerns with the future ramifications of the changes the he is advocating.

He listened calmly over and over but as he spoke it was very evident that he had put a major investment of time and energy to arrive at the best available solution. He politely but decisively explained why the changes were necessary and what he was doing to protect current employees and the fiscal future of the state.

I don’t know if many people at the meeting were swayed as he spoke, but I very much respected how he tackled this difficult issue head on and did not bend to the myopic perspective of some vocal constituents by choosing the irresponsible option of punting the decision to the future.

It’s not really fair to expect everyone to have an up or down opinion on a candidate within a week of their campaign being announced. For that reason there should be nothing surprising about the fact that Bob Lonsberry is not sold on Mike Lee (yet). As he aired his minor reservations with our latest 2010 Senate candidate he got talking about term limits – because Mike Lee thinks we should have a term limits amendment (perhaps like this one) – and Bob’s position completely failed to add up. At first I was planning to just comment on Bob’s site, but I felt that this deserved a full post.

There is a disconnect between Bob’s position on term limits and what he says later in his article. Here’s what he thinks of term limits:

Yes, people serve way too long in Congress. Yes, we have a professional political class right now. But the insinuation that the era of the Founders was much different doesn’t stand up to the test of history. Several of the Founders themselves held elected office for years on end. Some for the majority of their lives, and our Republic was benefited by their service.

And any person with Mike Lee’s knowledge of the Constitution must understand that an amendment mandating term limits would go against both the letter and the spirit of what the Founders wanted. Term limits don’t limit the freedom of politicians, they limit the freedom of the voters. We don’t need term limits, we have elections. And if Mike Lee, or someone else, can pose a viable alternative to Bob Bennett, and convince voters of that fact, the Constitution’s existing system for replacing politicians will work perfectly.

Later he makes this statement which exposes the weakness of his position:

I’m also bothered by Mike Lee’s age. Not that a 38-year-old can’t serve well in the Senate, but that he’s got so much life left. True, he is saying that people shouldn’t make a career of Washington, but so too did the two current Utah senators, both of whom have since made a career of Washington. Everybody running against incumbents is against long tenure in office. And everybody running for re-election believes in experience and seniority.

My concern is that at 38, Utah could be biting off something it will take 30 or 40 years to chew. I’m nervous about that.

The one selling point for 76-year-old Bob Bennett is that, at his age, he’s got a built-in term limit. He’s also, as they say, the devil you know. (emphasis added)

In case you missed the disconnect, Bob says that the founders already established a way to limit terms through regular elections and then worries that we might be stuck with Mike Lee for 40 years because he’s relatively young.

Here’s the half-truth that opens up the heart of the problem:

Term limits don’t limit the freedom of politicians, they limit the freedom of the voters. We don’t need term limits, we have elections.

It’s true that term limits limit the freedom of voters by eliminating the option to elect a president they like to a third term (to use our existing term limit as an example) – that’s the only freedom of the voters that is being limited. The problem is that the freedom of voters is already severely limited by our lack of term limits because of our political environment where potential candidates often choose not to challenge an incumbent, especially within their own party. For proof of that just look at how many more candidates tend to run for open seats. With term limits we would lose the option to vote for an incumbent after a set time, but we would gain so many candidates who currently choose not to run against an incumbent.

Bob claims that the founders did not want term limits and he’s probably right (although I doubt they ever addressed the issue to prove that conclusively) but they didn’t want parties either (they did make that clear) and we have parties anyway. The party system without term limits makes the regular election cycle a very weak way to limit terms – especially in a place where one party is dominant. Bob says that if someone can pose a viable alternative to an incumbent and convince voters of that fact then the system works perfectly. The question is, how can that happen when the potential candidates remove themselves from consideration because of the system that tilts heavily in favor of incumbents? And what makes a viable candidate? If a viable candidate is one that has the capacity and interest necessary to tackle the issues and do the job of a senator then I am a viable candidate. If a viable candidate is one that voters are likely to believe in that I am nowhere near viable. The first one should be the criteria, and if it were we would have lots of viable candidates for any office.

In a nation that probably has 80 out of 100 senate seats safely in the hands of one party or another and only about 20 seats that actually have a reasonable chance of changing hands from one election to the next the method of limiting terms that the Founders established is virtually impotent. The era of the founders may not have been much different than our era but it was different in some important ways. In this environment the Founders might find term limits to be a very reasonable method to ensure that the voters had the maximum amount of choice in candidates.

I wish that I could provide a link to the poll Curtis cited showing that 68% of Republican political insiders who favor bringing back the tax on unprepared food. (Curtis has now provided the link to that poll – thanks.) On the other hand I can provide a link to a report from Senator John Valentine stating that Governor Herbert has submitted a budget devoid of any tax increases. I hope that budget is also free of numerous fee increases, but either way I recognize that it is the legislature and not the Governor who will ultimately pass a budget bill to deal with the shortfall.

Amazingly, amid his criticism of what he expects out of the Republican legislature, Curtis fails to mention even a hint of disappointment with Democrats despite his acknowledgment that the same poll showed that 81% of Democratic political insiders favored reinstating the food tax. (With the link to the poll Curtis also provided the correction that 81% of Democratic political insiders are against reinstating the food tax.) While I hold out hope that the food tax will stay dead, based on what Senator Valentine said about the Governors proposed budget, I am absolutely confident that if the food tax returns it will be the result of the democratic super-minority in the legislature being unwilling to make necessary cuts along with a good chunk of Republican legislators who do not have strong principles against government control of virtually everything. It will be the Democrats and these semi-principled Republicans who are unwilling to make unpleasant cuts in waste and some not-truly-critical programs who force the return of the food tax if it does come back to life.

Looking forward to the next legislative session I would give at least 50% odds that the food tax returns to Utah. If it does, I hope that final suggestion that Curtis makes – that any tax increases (and I would add fee increases) in the budget have a sunset clause built in so that the legislature is required to revisit those increases as the economy recovers in the next couple of years – is attached to the budget bill that finally passes.

{Sam} Rushforth has been studying at {Utah Lake} for 35 years and said there needs to be an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) conducted while the bridge over the lake is being considered.

Those who have read here long enough know that I am in favor of building a bridge over the lake and even if I weren’t I think it is inevitable in the long run. The argument that a bridge over the lake will bring more growth to Utah county is laughable – the growth is coming either way. One comment on the article says that a bridge is not necessary with the arrival of the new roads under construction through Lehi on the north end of the lake. Having lived in Lehi and worked on Main Street there I am absolutely convinced that no matter how much road they build there it will be congested very quickly with the ever increasing demand of the growing populations in the area – a bridge will make a significant impact on commute time.

Having said all of that, my support of building a bridge does not interfere with my belief that doing an EIS is absolutely imperative in order to do it right. I would consider such a study to be the very least in the way of due diligence on the part of those who want to build a bridge.

Since I no longer live in Utah County, I no longer have a vested interest in the outcome of this debate like I once did. I consider myself to be a relatively informed and now more objective observer and long term I am certain that the bridge, if it is done right, will be a benefit to Utah County residents and possibly to the lake itself. I urge all those who are actively discussing this issue to not rush their decisions – simply throwing up some steel girders and a wide slab of concrete would be a travesty but doing nothing or putting off bridge planning until it becomes truly critical would be foolhardy.

Start now.Take your time. Do it right.