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One amusing parlor game might be to name activities that are more interesting than this year's state elections: watching nails rust, driving across Nebraska, swapping blizzard tales (mine is simple: what blizzard? Salida had the state high with 49 on a sunny Wednesday).
The political scene of the Centennial State is usually more entertaining, but this year, there's a shortage of useful issues. We have issues, but they aren't the kind of issues that a candidate can deal with.
For instance, education consumes a considerable portion of the state's budget, and nobody is pleased with the current system.
That should make education a hot issue. However, advocates of the voucher plan -- the only possibility for genuine and effective change -- will be dismissed as cranks and weirdos if it even gets on the ballot.
What remains are some minor procedural changes, such as removing some of the lifetime sinecure provisions from the tenure law. But even that got diluted in the legislature, so that any changes would affect only new hires. It demonstrates that the power in Colorado education lies not with the governor or the legislature, but with the teachers' unions.
Thus our political process is unable to improve education in Colorado. Why bother making an election issue out of it?
Prisons present a similar problem, except that it is the federal courts that really run the corrections system. A candidate's views about prison spending simply don't matter.
Even water has lost its political vitality. The biggest recent water decision was Two Forks. The governor straddled it, and the decision was finally made, not in Denver, but in Washington. Apparently Romer didn't have an opinion about Two Forks, but what difference would it have made if he had?
Given that, who's going make an issue out of Union Park or Elephant Rock or any of a dozen other schemes to make Colorado less fit to live in?
Every so often, one of our leaders announces that
Colorado should become a world leader in transportation
and telecommunication.
That might have potential for an issue, except that what
they really mean is that metro Denver should become a
world leader in telecommunications and automotive pollution
and congestion.
Build W-470, forget any light-rail mass transit in the city, and expand the interstates. The rest of this world-leading state can manage with abandoned rail lines, crumbling highways, sporadic bus service and party-line telephones.
That's the infrastructure
you hear about
sometimes, but it's never a real issue because no one has
any specific proposals -- that would cost money which would
have to come from somewhere, which might upset some
potential voters.
Little wonder that the GOP has trouble finding a
candidate for governor. Even a statehouse Republican has
better things to do than spend the next eight months
repeating the only thing any Colorado candidate can say:
I share your deep concerns on this issue, and Colorado
must move forward into the 21st century.
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