When I was young I learned to ride at a local stable. This stable was very clear about its rules. Everyone, no exceptions, had to muck out the stalls, clean tack, groom the horses and generally keep the stable fresh and clean. If you thought this was not for you, you didn't get to ride - period. When you finished riding, you did not toss the reins to some waiting stableboy, you worked. No amount of money would buy you any privilege.
This memory stays firmly in my mind as I view the job we are demanding of the newly elected 2006 Congress and as I watch the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates leap from the starting gate.
What I see when I look at our governmental stable and our Constitutional tack is over thirty years of accumulated filth, decay, rot and neglect. The barn has been overrun with rats and a few idle loafers are lounging against the water trough in the late afternoon sun waiting to go home.
To the Congress: tidying up a bit and making things look a bit better for visitors isn't going to cut it. Every Senator and Representative we elected is expected to get in there and shovel out the manure, hose and scrub the place down, spread fresh straw, replace rotten boards, and act as barn cats when necessary to get rid of the vermin. Patch the holes in the roof; replace the whole roof if you have to. After letting in a lot of fresh air and sunlight, find the Constitution, dust it off, shine and polish it, make it sparkle like the first time it was written. We, the horses, have taken to the fields to fend for ourselves the best we can. May of us are sick, dirty, lost our shoes; some of us are old and spavined. But we've gotten tough out here in the fields and we're not going to be rounded up and taken back into the barn until you clean it up and make a firm contract with us on how we'll be treated. We elected stablehands and that's what we'll get - if not now, then 2008.
And to our 2008 Democratic preidential hopefuls: Give us your visions, your hopes and your dreams. Dress in your best jodhpurs, and polished leather boots. But if you think that you will be riding on our backs into that beautiful vista of the future, we say - if you haven't shoveled your fair share of manure and cleaned up our barn, you don't get to ride.