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My folks visited recently, and my dad and I talked politics. He's a hard-core NRA-life-member Republican, and he was distressed at the gubernatorial campaign.
I don't know how the Republicans managed this,
he
groused.
Managed what?
I asked.
There are about a million Republicans in Colorado,
aren't there?
That sounded a little high, but close enough for communing over coffee. I nodded.
So why is it that, out of a million to pick from,
they found the only Republican who could make me vote for
Roy Romer?
My own dark theory is that the state Republican hierarchy has certain goals for Colorado, primarily their personal enrichment.
Given that, why bother with electing Republicans to office if there are Democrats who will pursue the plan? If things go well, you get what you really want. If they don't, as with Denver International Airport, you can always blame somebody else.
Just look at who's run against Romer: Ted Strickland, John Andrews, now Bruce Benson -- always the weakest candidate the GOP could find.
My dad allowed that there might be some basis for my
paranoid delusions. It makes sense. Benson was the party
chairman for a long time, so he could have organized things
that way. Look at Federico Pena with the airport and
convention center, Tim Wirth with the cable operators. Who
needs Republicans when we've got Democrats like that?
Maybe one of the other Republican
candidates--Sargent, Bird, Klingsmith--would have upset
that cozy arrangement. So Benson had to buy the nomination
for himself, so that he could run and lose with such a lame
campaign that even I will vote for Romer.
Judging by what I've seen and heard, the biggest issue in the Romer-Benson contest is not some trifling matter like land use, transportation, education or water allocation.
Instead, Colorado voters are most concerned about the court records of Benson's divorce.
Nationally, we rank second in the percentage of people with four or more years of college. The District of Columbia, which will soon make Marion Barry mayor again, ranks first. West Virginia, where they worry about health care and corporate exploitation, ranks dead last. Now will someone please explain how a college education makes people into informed citizens?
The court records of Benson's divorce had been sealed. A Denver television station successfully petitioned to get the records opened. A lot of people are mad at KUSA for supposedly invading Benson's privacy.
There are two issues: 1) Do the divorce records tell us anything we should know when we're deciding whether to vote for Benson? and 2) Should such court records be open to the public?
For the first question, I'd like to argue that if a man
cannot abide by a vow to cleave unto a woman until death
do us part,
then he will not take his oath of office
seriously.
But the two don't seem to be connected. You can find a president like Warren G. Harding who was a philanderer, and an inept executive. Then again, there were effective presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt who also carried on affairs.
There is no apparent relationship between a man's qualities as a husband and his ability to perform in public office. A Robert Packwood might be a drunken lecher to be avoided in private circumstances, but still do well at representing Oregon's interests in the United States Senate.
So for the first issue, the answer is no. Nothing in Benson's divorce file, no matter how lurid, enables us to predict what Colorado would be like after he spent four years in the governor's office.
As for the second, of course the court records should be open to the public. We shouldn't allow any sealed court records in Colorado.
Why? When people go to court, they are asking us -- us meaning the people of Colorado -- to mediate their differences and to enforce the outcome.
So we are a party to every court proceeding. We provide the judges and juries, the courtrooms and the bailiffs, the police and the process-servers.
And yet, if a court record is sealed, we don't know what was done with our money and in our name. Doctors can continue their malpractice, making sealed settlements. Newspapers and broadcast outlets can hush up libel suits. Corporations can insure that we don't hear about their defective or dangerous products.
If they want to reach private agreements, that's one thing. But if they want our courts and our police to enforce those agreements, then those agreements are public business.
Benson's divorce records should have been open all along, even if they're irrelevant to his campaign. And even I might vote for him if he promised that there would never be another sealed record in Colorado.
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