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While everybody else in Colorado was celebrating the triumph of the Avs over the Av-nots last week, a disturbing item appeared among the small items that newspapers publish when they run out of home-team sports news -- you know, those minor things like an election in Russia, a 100-year drought in the American Southwest, the Republican effort to hide Newt Gingrich until after the election, etc.
The disturbing item was the speculation that our own Dick Lamm might be running for president on a third-party ticket this year.
Certainly the major parties have not been kind to Colorado aspirants. Gary Hart, once the front-runner for the 199\88 Democratic nomination, may have taught Bill Clinton how not to handle bimbo eruptions, but that's about the size of his contribution to presidential politics.
Pat Schroeder was briefly promoted as a presidential material in that same year, but nothing happened.
Among Republicans, then Sen. Bill Armstrong surfaced among vice-presidential possibilities in 1988, and then vanished.
My guess is that the major parties avoid Colorado candidates, not because Colorado has only eight electoral votes, but because they know that Colorado is hard on presidents. Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a major heart attack while vacationing in Colorado 40 years ago, and it was in Pueblo that Woodrow Wilson suffered his stroke while out stumping for the League of Nations after World War I.
Better for the national stability if presidents avoid Colorado as much as possible, and a Colorado president can't stay away from here as easily as a non-Coloradan.
But Ross Perot's organization is too new to be aware of this dismal tradition, and further, a Lamm-Perot ticket solves some problems.
If Perot is out of the running entirely, he can donate only $1,000 to the campaign. If he's on the ticket, he can buy all the TV time he wants for the campaign. With Lamm at the top, they have someone who, unlike Perot, has held public office.
Lamm would presumably run as someone who would talk straight about the problems facing the country and propose tough solutions.
Heaven knows, we could use a candidate like that, but there are complications. Back in 1974, when Lamm was running against John Vanderhoof for governor of Colorado, I got into a heated political argument with my father, who's a fairly devout Republican.
If you vote for Johnny Van,
I said, the whole
Interstate-70 corridor through the mountains will be
trashed out with franchise strips. Subdivisions and
developments will pop up everywhere, even in remote and
rural places like the San Luis Valley and South Park. The
metro area will ooze outward. They'll always be talking
about building new and expensive highways, along with
gruesome water projects.
Some years later, we recalled that discussion. You
were right,
my dad said. I voted for Vanderhoof, and
all that bad stuff happened.
Ronald Reagan, of all people, came to Lamm's rescue. No sooner did the Great Communicator take office than the Colorado economy collapsed. Mines and sawmills closed, oil prices plummeted, Denver was full of empty office buildings and Colorado lost population.
Thus was Colorado's environment saved so that it could be trashed in the current boom, driven by other factors. Politics takes some strange twists, which means that, if Lamm is elected, we might read something like this a few years after he takes office:
WASHINGTON -- Dismayed by the rising population and consequent drain on the federal treasury, President Richard Lamm yesterday outlined a program designed to bring about national solvency.
After telling the audience to stand up, damn it,
he named Michigan physician Dr. Jack Kevorkian as surgeon
general. Over the years, Dr. Kevorkian has demonstrated
the skills necessary to solve the problems presented by
certain segments of our population,
the President
said.
Lamm also announced that the government will encourage
youngsters to take up smoking tobacco. I know that, when
I was governor of Colorado, I took the lead in attempting
to ban smoking. But when you factor in the numbers --
smokers die sooner and quicker, thus cutting pension and
medical costs -- it becomes apparent that the habit offers
economic benefits to society as a whole.
He lit a ceremonial first White House cigarette and moved on to the rest of his program.
Current immigration policies have failed
miserably,
the President said. No matter how high we
build the wall, they keep climbing over it, and when we
catch the violators and return them, they just try to come
back again. I am now issuing new weapons to the Immigration
and Naturalization Service. Every time the INS catches
unregistered aliens, agents will drive silver stakes
through them. I have every confidence that this will
prevent them from returning.
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