I believe that we, as a party, have gotten away from service and have slipped into the all-too-familiar politics of division. Let's join with other Americans and work these differences out together. We have a great platform on which to serve, but if we use it as a spingboard for "politics as usual", we will once again defeat ourselves in the long run. Our overarching goal isn't to make the "other side" suffer, but to make sure that every American gets blessed by what we do. I don't expect that all Americans would agree on the specific points of the platform, much more, understand them, but if we remember that our government doesn't rule in our representative Republic by majority; it rules by the consent of the governed. Let's be the first to use this tact to arrive at our goals: consent. We will find the debate much more in favor of us, because we won't be putting down the other side, we will be including them.
For this to happen though, something very important must be understood. Thomas Jefferson believed this wholeheartedly, and it is in his most important writings: the strength of the citizens of this nation to maintain this representative Republic doesn't reside in the political rhetoric of its leaders, but it is in the well-informed will of the people. The "well-informed will of the people" means that they are educated in the precepts and concepts of the representative Republic, and in so being, are more likely to choose candidates who espouse the principles upon which this representative Republic was founded.
We are the heart and soul of our government, and in so being, we have a great responsibility to "keep the Republic". Whenever I vote, I don't vote for a personality, I vote for the principles and concepts of the representative Republic that the candidate supports. And the more candidates that support keeping the Republic, as Benjamin Franklin calls us to do, as citizens of this so great nation, the easier it will be to keep it from failing in any way or form the way that other nations and civilizations have fallen. What say ye?
And so it is!
David H. Coffey
We need to call ourselves to a greater sense of our reponsibility to keep our Republic from any kind of danger. The greatest danger to our chosen form of government, to our great experiment, is to grow casual and lazy in our defense of the precepts and concepts upon which this nation was founded.
