Forty-Five Years Ago This Week: “The Democratic Party lost the battles of ideas and political technology last November,” Gov. Dick Lamm told the Boulder County Democratic Party at the annual Harry S. Truman Memorial Dinner.

Lamm argued that the Democratic Party had been riding the tide that had carried the elections of 1928, 1932 and 1936 and it was wholly insufficient to carry the party into 1980. 

“Republicans are the party that voters perceived as having the new ideas,” Lamm said “Democrats have been in power so long that they deserved the image they had as the defenders of the status quo. The only thing all Democrats could agree on was the need to stay in power.”

Lamm argued that in order to move successfully into the future, the party needed to be about more than just generating new ideas to meet long-term societal needs, they had to learn to also successfully market those new ideas.

“It feels almost obscene to have to sell ideas, but if we are to gain the support of the voters we must let them know what we are about and why our ideas are better,” Lamm said.

Lamm called the Republican Party the “electronic party of computers while the Democratic party is the party of index cards and legal note pads.”

This wholehearted adoption of modern technology had massively increased the effectiveness of Republican Party’s fundraising operations.

Lamm said that in addition to taking lessons from Republicans on modernizing organization and fundraising procedures, the Democrats should also borrow four traditionally conservative ideas into party thinking: “Decentralizing government, good management practices in running government, stronger measures to deal with crime and the idea that the era of cheap energy is over.”

Twenty-Five Years Ago: A new U.S. Forest Service policy that would give the federal government de-facto authority to strip water users of a significant portion of their water rights would have dire consequences for Coloradans according to U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard and Rep. Scott McInnis, R-CD 3.

“The policy, one of a litany of legally suspect pronouncements made in the waning days of the Clinton administration … in our opinion represents the single largest threat to water users in Colorado. It promises to permanently upset the time-honored preeminence of the states in their dealings with the federal government on water related issues,” Allard and McInnis wrote in a letter to The Colorado Statesman.

For 135 years, Allard and McInnis wrote, Congress had expressly deferred to the states in matters relating to the allocation and administration of water rights. Rather than creating sweeping national guidelines, Congress had largely let the states handle their own water issues in the way they saw fit.

The new “bypass flow” policy, according to McInnis and Allard, would allow the Forest Service to “blackmail water users into surrendering a portion of their water rights as a condition of renewing land use permits for existing water facilities — a pipeline or a ditch for instance — on U.S. National Forest land.”

Allard and McInnis felt that, at the practical level, if the Forest Service was allowed to maintain this authority, existing water users would be denied critical water supplies without compensation, including “every Colorado community which gets their water from an existing reservoir.”

“We have both urged the Bush administration to rethink the Forest Service’s bypass flow policy,” Allard and McInnis wrote. “We believe strongly that there is a way to protect the ecological values of our state’s rivers and streams without usurping the legal rights of our citizens.”

Rachael Wright is the author of several novels including The Twins of Strathnaver, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing columnist to Colorado Politics, the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Denver Gazette.