< PREVIOUS ] [ 1997 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Several months ago at a social gathering, I ran into a local hard-core Republican activist. Naturally we started talking politics, and as a registered Democrat I graciously offered her our governor, Roy Romer.
Oh, no, we don't want him,
she said.
But why not?
I pressed. He's never met a
billionaire he wouldn't roll over for -- isn't that the
very definition of a modern Republican?
You're being unfair, but you've got a point,
she
conceded. There's a problem with Romer, though. If he
was an honest Democrat -- and I could respect that -- he'd
do the bidding of the teachers' union and would oppose the
billionaire. An honest Republican would support the
billionaire and fight the teachers' union. But Roy, well,
he rolls over for both the union and the billionaire. So
why would we want him?
Good question. Romer can't run for governor again next year, and he just announced that he won't run for the U.S. Senate. As lame ducks go, he can't even waddle.
This may alarm some Democrats, but the Republicans should be even more worried.
For many years, Colorado Republicans have enjoyed a no-lose political situation. Of course they ran their own candidates, but that was mostly for show, since even if the Democrat won, their own corporate agenda would be pursued anyway.
There's Romer, presiding over the biggest real-estate development binge since the Silver Crash of 1893, slighting rural transportation and communication problems, ever building more prisons. What more could Republican campaign contributors want?
And there was Sen. Tim Wirth, firm friend of the cable TV industry, which contributed generously to his campaigns. And Federico Pena, the Denver mayor who decided the city needed a new airport after the appropriate campaign contributions rolled in a decade ago.
From the GOP perspective, all these office-holders advance traditional Republican goals of government subsidy and protection for the wealthy and the free market for the rest of us. And, if any of these projects ran into trouble, the Republicans could always blame the Democrat in charge. So either way, the Republicans couldn't lose.
But Romer is leaving the scene, and the others have already fled Colorado politics.
So Colorado Republicans face two choices:
1) Find a compliant and useful Democrat who can win a state-wide race, or
2) Actually hold office and responsibility themselves.
The first may be impossible, since I can't think of any Democrat, compliant or otherwise, who could win a state-wide race besides Romer. And that holds even if Colorado Republicans pull their usual trick and nominate a weak candidate -- remember Bruce Benson? John Andrews? Ted Strickland? I thought not -- for governor.
There are plenty of GOP possibilities, starting with State Treasurer Bill Owens, who predicted in 1995 that this continuing growth spree would end soon if it hadn't already ended, and on down the list through Attorney General Chain-Gang Gale Norton and assorted legislators who are tough on all criminals who can't afford lobbyists. But could any of them actually lose for the good of the party?
The second choice is bad for the GOP on the grounds of
only Nixon could go to China.
That is, Americans would trust Richard Nixon, a man who built his political career on fighting Communism, not to sell us out if he dealt with the Reds. If, say, Hubert Humphrey had won the 1968 election and had acted precisely the same way toward Beijing as Nixon, they'd still be burning Humphrey in effigy at American Legion halls. It's the perception, not the action, that matters.
Suppose a Republican governor had, at the behest of a major GOP contributor like Phil Anschutz, granted a sales-tax exemption to his company, then agreed dismantle a quarter of the state's main-line rail mileage, which also meant losing a couple thousand good-paying blue-collar jobs.
If that happened with a Republican governor, there would be calls for investigations and impeachment proceedings. With a Democrat, nobody who matters even notices.
So if Colorado Republicans want to continue their merry ways, they've got to find a Democrat who can win, along with a Republican who can lose.
That looks like a major challenge for 1998, but the alternative -- a governor who got held accountable for his services to various corporate interests -- would be revolutionary, and thus frightening, for Colorado.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1997 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >