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Some strains are showing in the relationship between Gov. Bill Owens and Lt. Gov. Joe Rogers. Rogers apparently sees himself as an independent elected official, while Owens views the office as an adjunct to his own.
The lieutenant governor's main job is to watch the governor's health, which has inspired some calls for abolishing the position.
The state senate, for instance, could elect a member who
would be the person to become governor in the event of
...
at the start of each session, thereby insuring that
Colorado had a clear line of executive succession.
Or another holder of state office, perhaps the secretary of state, could become governor if the office was vacant -- that's what happens in Arizona when governors leave office with the prosecutors hot after them.
But those sensible ideas won't go anywhere. The
position itself may rival John Adams' description of the
vice-presidency: My country has in its wisdom contrived
for me the most insignificant office that ever the
invention of man contrived or his imagination
conceived.
However useless the lieutenant governor might appear
after the election, the candidate is important during the
campaign. In a state as divided as Colorado, political
parties need to balance the ticket
with the
lieutenant governor candidate.
This is a relatively recent development. They used to run on separate ballot lines, so that in my early college years, we had a Republican governor, John Love, and a Democratic lieutenant governor, Mark Hogan, who would be in charge whenever Love was out of the state.
There was talk that this kept Love from traveling. It did inspire a change, so that in 1970 the two executive candidates, although selected independently, ran on the same ballot line.
And so there was a geographically balanced ticket -- John Love, from the Eastern Slope, for governor, and John Vanderhoof, from the Western Slope, for lieutenant governor.
That east-west balance also emerged in the Roy Romer - Mike Callahan ticket, and before that Dick Lamm and Nancy Dick (who offered a double balance as both a female and a Western Slope resident).
Then there are the racial balances, as with a black George Brown running for lieutenant governor with a white Dick Lamm in 1974. And balances that go beyond that -- Joe Rogers, who is black and a resident of the city, running with Bill Owens, who is white and such a suburban resident that he doesn't want to move into the governor's mansion in the city.
Balancing the ticket
is a fixture in American
politics (Clinton-Gore being a rare exception with two
Southerners of about the same age). It's a way for a party
to say we care about you and deserve your support, even
if one of your people didn't get the top slot.
It's such a valuable political tool that I can't imagine either major party in Colorado supporting any plan that would eliminate it. In other words, we're stuck with the lieutenant governor position, no matter how expensive or useless. The position is just too important during the campaign.
Further, the lieutenant governor can be useful after the election. It's one thing to take to the hustings during the excitement of the campaign, but quite another to careen around from the almost-in-Utah Backwater County Lincoln Day Dinner to the almost-in-Nebraska crowning of the Queen of the Greater Boondocks Sugar Beet Festival.
The governor has a state to run; the lieutenant governor has nothing better to do. Thus those of us in the hinterlands receive ceremonial visits, thereby confirming that we are part of Colorado. Meanwhile the governor can devote himself to important matters of state like meeting with US West lobbyists and lunching with Anschutz agents.
Lieutenant governors can also be handed hot potatoes to juggle, as when Roy Romer persuaded his lieutenant, Gail Schoettler, to look into finding yet another compromise on the Animas-La Plata project. It was a tricky mess for a Democrat, since environmentalists hate it while most of the Southern Ute nation favors it. If something workable had emerged, Romer could have taken the credit, and if not, he could say he did his best, sending none other than the lieutenant governor.
So, even if the lieutenant governor's only statutory duty is to chair the Colorado Indian Affairs Commission, the position has important informal uses -- balancing the ticket, visiting the out-country, providing political cover.
Those jobs have to be done, and who better to do them than somebody who doesn't have anything else to do?
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