A Liberal Mandate: Reflections on Our Founding Vision and Rants on How We Have Failed to Achieve It

This nation only recently emerged from enduring a near ruinous full-scale conservative assault on America's founding vision. With President Obama we have an opportunity to once again return to our roots, but we must seize this occasion, or it may be lost for decades to come. A LIBERAL MANDATE argues that the vision handed down to us by our founding fathers through the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution mandates a liberal approach to governance. In the first two sentences of the Declaration along with the Preamble, the framers eloquently and profoundly describe what we could and should become. "Without a vision the people perish." No country in history has had a more inspiring vision, but we have been ignoring it, and the American Dream has turned into a nightmare for far too many of us. A LIBERAL MANDATE is also personal, born out of sadness and anger, hope and despair, pride and embarrassment. "In order to form a more perfect Union." We will never fully realize the vision set out for us, but each generation has a moral obligation to "more" closely approximate it. This polemic, diatribe, rant is an attempt to make a contribution to that obligation.