Tom Pauken

Questions and Answers Part 1…

Questions and Answers Part 2…

Questions and Answers Part 3…

Question and answers part 4…

“The American people sense the seriousness of this moment in our history.”
Tom Pauken, Chairman
Texas Workforce Commission

The single most important message from the man who chairs the Texas Workforce Commission: “Government cannot create jobs. Only the private sector can create jobs.”

A second theme which runs throughout his new book, Bringing America Home is that the American people understand, better than the current crop of politicians, the dangers to the health of our nation posed by Washington’s big-spending, big government explosion which he traces back to the years of the post-Reagan presidency. He is particularly concerned that extraordinary spending by the federal government during our current economic dilemma could lead to an all-out economic implosion for America.

Tom Pauken, for four decades, has been both a conservative and an activist. He served as a military intelligence officer in Viet Nam. He was called “an outmoded Cold Warrior” by the communist propaganda newspaper Izvestia. He worked in the Reagan White House. He served on the Administration’s leadership team for First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say, “No!” campaign against illegal drug use. He headed the federal agency now known as Americorps when it was called ACTION during the latter years of the Reagan Administration, and its stated mission was getting American youth trained for and placed in stable jobs. Pauken says in his book that in reality, the agency had devolved into little more than the primary funding source for what he termed, “poverty pimps.”

After he reduced the size of his agency and cut funding for politically motivated community organizers, Pauken came home to Texas where he was elected to head the Texas Republican Party as its chairman during the Governorship of George W. Bush. Today And, he chairs, the Texas Workforce Commission at the behest of Governor Rick Perry who appointed him to the post.

In addition to his continuing service within Texas government as Gov. Perry’s designee, Tom Pauken still stands as one who is respected in conservative circles as a stalwart champion of conservative principles, and as an influential and articulate voice of conservative activists across the state of Texas and within the national dialog. His new book, Bringing America Home is subtitled How America Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back.

It is not a treatise on employment policy for the state, but rather represents Pauken’s personal challenge to conservatives for self examination. It is not a personal manifesto, but rather an offering of his understanding of foundational conservative issues, along with his reasons explaining how and why the policies of those once elected to high office as conservatives have led to realities inconsistent with the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan.

Pauken cites policies of the Clinton, G.H.W. Bush , G.W. Bush, and Obama administrations which have led to growing and unsustainable deficits in the federal budget and in foreign trade, continuing involvement of American troops abroad where the nation’s security interests are murky, and the loss of faith of the American people in elected officials who have professed conservative platitudes while presiding over rising taxes and the inexorable growth of big government at the expense of the middle class and the private sector. His conclusion is that “conservatives”, including both Democrats and Republicans, abandoned the clear principles of conservative thought which created the conservative movement which, in turn culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980 which he describes as the high-point of conservatism in America. His prescription for America’s healing is two-fold: return to those principles; and, govern by them.

I interviewed Chairman Pauken March 25, 2010 about his book and about how it informs his work in his present assignment as Chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission. The highlights of that interview follow.

Continue reading →

From the Washington Times:  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/31/pauken-high-iqs-brilliantly-wrong/

By Tom Pauken

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

“Reinventing conservatism” is really about reclaiming conservatism from those post-Reagan Republican leaders who hijacked the conservative movement and paved the way for the Obama administration to come to power.

What passes for conservatism in the post-Reagan era is barely recognizable to many of us who were grass-roots activists in the early days of the modern conservative movement — especially after eight years of a Republican administration headed by George W. Bush, who claimed to be a conservative.

The Bush administration failed to act in time to stem the credit and spending excesses of our “bubble economy.” Spending doubled at the Education Department; and federal mandates increased as well under the George W. Bush/Edward M. Kennedys “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Bush officials completely ignored the warnings of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater in “The Conscience of a Conservative” that federal funding inevitably leads to federal control over education and ideological conformity. The Obama administration has upped the ante by substantially increasing federal spending on education and imposing additional federal mandates. Continue reading →

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in 2008.  A leading dissident exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, he was without question one of the world’s great intellects—a novelist and historian and a keen observer, who left behind a prescient warning for America and the West.  Few politicians today are thinkers, few sophisticated enough to pick up on the signs in front of their faces, much less inside the theoretical discourse contained in pages of books and speeches.  Fortunately Tom Pauken is no ordinary politician, but rather a statesman for our time.  He has written an important book, which lays out the kind of fundamental choice Robert Frost may have referenced, when he spoke of regret and of the Road Not Taken: “Two roads diverged in a wood,” and the choice “made all the difference.”

America today faces such a choice.  One road leadeth to green pastures and beside still waters potentially.  Ironically it is the same path that leads back home; whereas the other road leads on in the general direction we’re headed to destruction and downfall, and to end times for our country.  Tom Pauken cites Solzhenitsyn at length in his new book, Bringing America Home ( Rockford , Illinois : Chronicles Press, 2010).  He analyzes Solzhenitsyn’s warning and breaks it down into six thematic parts.  The anatomy of Solzhenitsyn’s warning reads like a chronicle of what is happening and of night far spent, but don’t forget that the point of sounding an alarm is an implicit hope that somebody somewhere can and will do something to ward off the defeat and/or to escape the danger.  The fire department may actually put out the fire, a hospital dispatch an ambulance and paramedic.  Police may scare off the bad guys or arrest them in a criminal act; or respond with counterforce if it comes to that and win the gunfight.  The cavalry rides to the proverbial rescue in other words!  In politics this means that people awake from their stupor and participate in the democratic process.  They show up on Election Day and throw the bums out. Continue reading →

Whatever Happened to Conservatism?       PDF

Bringing America Home: How America Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back, Tom Pauken, Chronicles Press, 204 pages

BY DANIEL MCCARTHY

The American Right, like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront,” could have been a contender. Bill Clinton’s defeat of George H.W. Bush in 1992 cleared the way for a new wave of conservatives to storm Congress, state governments, and the inner sanctums of the Republican Party itself. Although Newt Gingrich became the symbol of this revolution, a truer representative was Thomas Pauken, elected chairman of the Texas GOP in 1994. Where Gingrich was an apostle of futurist Alvin Toffler, with but a passing interest in conservative thought, Pauken had drunk deeply of the ideas of James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and George Carey—whose student he had been at Georgetown University.

The Texas press and political establishment reacted in horror to Pauken’s “takeover” of the Republican Party. It was as if Pat Buchanan had become chairman of the RNC. Christian conservatives had been indispensable to his victory, as they were to the nomination of right-leaning Republican candidates across the country. (The media referred to many of these as “stealth candidates,” though most were outspoken about their antiabortion, anti-tax, and pro-Second Amendment views.) The party’s old guard resented the intrusion of these uncouth newcomers, but the ’94 elections vindicated the Right. The public demanded an alternative to Clinton-style liberalism that GOP moderates could not supply. Continue reading →