ANNOUNCEMENT of CANDIDACY 10/ 19/01

I welcome the opportunity, at this time of extraordinary national crisis, to serve the people of Texas and of our country in the Senate of the United States. I pledge to devote my best efforts to respond with competence, leadership, innovation and knowledge gained from an exceptionally long, diverse, and productive career in public and private service, to advance the best values of American civil and religious traditions in the United States Senate.

Why we need physicists in the U. S. Senate

What does America need in the U. S. Senate today - a fifty- fourth lawyer, or its first physicist member? Since President Eisenhower, the Executive Branch has had Science Advisers, and almost all have been physicists. Dr. Lawrence Cranberg has more than sixty years of experience as Professor of Physics, as entrepreneur, inventor, science consultant on high energy physics and environmental and energy issues, as journalist and civil libertarian, as advocate on elder-care legal and health issues, and as Senior Physicist in the Department of Defense research programs.

It is a remarkable fact of American political-scientific history that according to Dr. Spencer Weart, the Director of the History of Physics Project of the American Institute of Physics, the U. S. Senate has never had a physicist member. The closest exception was Benjamin Franklin, the leading physicist of his age, who was one of the most productive and influential members of the Constitutional Convention of l787.

Lawrence with wife, Charlotte Mount Cranberg

On Age in Politics

Franklin passed away in l790, at age 84. That is my present age, but two hundred years of advances in medicine and public health have made huge improvements in the quality and span of human life. One purpose of my entry into politics at that age is to help dispel the myths and stereotypes about age and aging that have lingered too long in the minds of many.

America is the greatest meritocracy in the history of the world. Out-of-date stereotypes about aging are one of the most persistent obstacles to judging individuals on their merits. Let us dispel those myths. If we judge individuals on their merits, we can get on with the tasks before us of effective management of our very complex economic, security, health, environmental, and energy issues, with the best talents available to us. At the same time we shall be falling in step with the sensible, ancient practise of placing special trust in the judgment and experience of the older members of society.

The challenges we face are external and internal. The external ones of foreign terrorism need no emphasis here. But how many of us are aware that when Dr. Harold Shipman in Great Britain dispatched an estimated 300 of his older patients with poison, he was twice as effective on a per capita basis as the l9 terrorists who killed 3,000 occupants of the World Trade Center on September 11? But we neither see nor hear anything like the concern there should be about the rights of those older members of our society who must be protected against abuse, neglect, and exploitation. That is one particular neglect my candidacy aims to correct.

On Models, Political "Experience", and the Scientific Revolution

Franklin's most recent biographer, H. W. Brands, has called Franklin The First American. Franklin was indeed an admirable model of what it means to be an American. He was a self-made man-of-the-people, consistently innovative, and unafraid of controversy. If modern democracy has a serious weakness, it is the timidity of play-safe, precedent-bound, career politicians and bureaucrats who avoid controversy, pay only lip service to policy solutions that require major change, and are rarely influenced by the sweeping intellectual changes wrought by the Scientific Revolution, now three centuries old. The full assimilation of that Revolution into our national life has been slow but inevitable.

But democracy has a great redeeming strength in those who try to follow in the path of The First American, and who are encouraged to do so by the political support of their fellow Americans. Surprise, always a two-edged sword, can yet produce major improvements in many areas of our national life.

Scientists and the Two-party System

Scientists may stand aloof from politics if they see political allegiance as inconsistent with primary scientific values. But there is no fundamental reason to believe that first one party, then another, may not fully deserve the support of reasonable men and women, so that scientists can conscientiously serve party interests while preserving, as all honorable people should, the freedom to shift as truth and conscience demand.

I supported and still revere Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but I have served as a Public Policy Expert to the Republican-oriented Heritage Foundation for many years on many topics. I am proud to have been an ardent, active supporter of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, and look forward to contesting in the Republican primary for U. S. Senator from Texas this coming March.

Paid for by Lawrence Cranberg for Senate