When Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, set out to write Clean Energy Common Sense her goal was simple- To bring more people into the climate change conversation now. Now? Conversations on climate change are happening in real time across the internet, on talk radio, in nightly news casts, and beside the water cooler. With only weeks until the UN's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a book seems like the wrong medium to insert yourself into the conversation.

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Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. — President Barack Obama quoting Thomas Paine, The American Crisis #1, December 23, 1776

Not bad for a man that Teddy Roosevelt once described as "that filthy little atheist." The line that President Obama quoted today at the end of his Inaugural Address is from Thomas Paine's The American Crisis #1, the first in a series of 16 essays written between 1776 and 1780. Most Americans know the opening line "These are the times that try men's souls." Beyond that, most Americans are less aware of the circumstances or the rest of the contents of the American Crisis though it is perhaps the second most important piece of political essay writing, because of its immediate impact, in American history. It can be said that it saved the Revolution. The only other work of greater importance in the annals of American political essay writing is also from Paine. Common Sense stands apart in the annals of American political essays for the forty-seven page pamphlet published in January 1776 presented the argument for independence from British rule at a time when the question of independence was still undecided.

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Thomas Paine had some words of wisdom that are applicable to the current dismal state of affairs in the Democratic Party. Mr. Paine penned his words of "Common Sense" for a different time and his warning rings true today.
The few are manipulating the many and as Mr. Paine warned, it is to their own benefit not the benefit of those they were elected to represent.I quote Mr. Paine here -

"In a former page I likewise mentioned the necessity of a large and equal representation; and there is no political matter which more deserves our attention. A small number of electors, or a small number of representatives, are equally dangerous. But if the number of the representatives be not only small, but unequal, the danger is increased. As an instance of this, I mention the following; when the Associators petition was before the House of Assembly of Pennsylvania; twenty-eight members only were present, all the Bucks County members, being eight, voted against it, and had seven of the Chester members done the same, this whole province had been governed by two counties only, and this danger it is always exposed to. The unwarrantable stretch likewise, which that house made in their last sitting, to gain an undue authority over the delegates of that province, ought to warn the people at large, how they trust power out of their own hands. A set of instructions for the Delegates were put together, which in point of sense and business would have dishonored a school-boy, and after being approved by a few, a very few without doors, were carried into the house, and there passed in behalf of the whole colony; whereas, did the whole colony know, with what ill-will that House hath entered on some necessary public measures, they would not hesitate a moment to think them unworthy of such a trust."

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