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Has Colorado joined the United States?
Sorry to ruin your Sunday with that question, but our first presidential primary isn't working right. The candidates do indeed materialize within our borders, but they were supposed to address our concerns, the way they talk about textiles in New Hampshire, trees in Maine and pork in Iowa.
However, all we get are generic statements about leadership, commitment and economic development, stuff as meaningless in Las Animas as in Los Angeles. Maybe their advance people haven't briefed them on some Colorado issues:
· The federal government plans to spend $640.7 million on the Animas-La Plata project, which will irrigate 80,000 acres. That comes to $8,008.75 per acre. Around here, unirrigated land goes for about $250 an acre; irrigation makes it worth at most $2,500. Hey, guys, here's a golden opportunity to campaign against government waste, and while you're down in that neck of the woods, you can doubtless find a below-cost timber sale to hammer at, too.
· Four years ago, the environment
president
showed us a filthy Boston Harbor. We've got
some world-class pollution, too, perfectly suitable for
sound-bite attacks on the administration's record of
protecting the environment from protesters and recyclers:
the Yak Tunnel, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Rocky Flats, Denver
air.
· Some quick, stupid, local attack ads: Stress that Kerry is from Nebraska; all CU football fans, and they are legion, despise Nebraska and anything connected with it. Point out that Brown is from California, the place that covets Colorado water. Tsongas boasts of immigrant parents; it should be easy to tie him to the phone-disconnector bureaucrats at the Denver office of the Immigration Service.
Maybe they've missed all these opportunities because the
best spin doctors and media manipulators all now work for
the Postal Service. Two weeks ago, everybody was
complaining that the Postal Service, which never has enough
money to deliver the mail, somehow found enough money to
purchase an official Olympic sponsorship. But with the
excitement of the clever Vote for your favorite Elvis
stamp
campaign, all such grumbling has vanished.
If Bush had these guys, we'd be lining up to pay 19
cents to vote for our favorite new tax, rather than
remembering his inoperative no new taxes
pledge.
Anyway, I'm being public-minded today, so I should point out that the vast majority of the candidates have yet to be mentioned in the public prints. The Republican ballot has five names besides Buchanan and Bush: George A. Zimmerman, Terrance R. Scott, Tennie Rogers, Stephen A. Koczak and Paul S. Jensen.
The Democratic ballot offers 18 choices -- the five
we've all heard of, along with Eugene J. McCarthy (didn't
his 15 minutes of fame come 24 years ago?), Lyndon H.
LaRouche Jr. (serving time), Uncommitted
(why can't
we have that option at a general election, too?), Charles
Woods, Leonard Dennis Talbow, Tom Shiekman, Ray Rollinson,
J. Louis McAlpine, Jeffrey Marsh, Jim Hayes, Ted Howard
Hawks and Larry Agran (who even got on TV in South Dakota,
but what do they know?).
Granted, we don't know what any of these candidates stands for, but Ronald Reagan just told George Bush he has the same problem, and look how far Bush has gone.
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