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In this election year, we have heard about candidates
playing the race card
and the gender card.
Then there's the geography card.
The geography card has been played in national
campaigns, as with the dire warnings from Republicans in
2006 that if Democrats gained control of the U.S. House of
Representatives, then Nancy Pelosi would become Speaker of
the House, and impose her San Francisco values
on
the American heartland.
If only. She has served as speaker for more than a year, and I've yet to see any of those San Francisco values like high wages, climbing real-estate prices and excellent public transportation. Why can't the Republicans keep their promises?
In Colorado, the geography card has come into play with
the Republican effort to tag Democratic senate candidate
Mark Udall as a Boulder liberal.
Udall resides in
nearby Eldorado Springs, which is in Boulder County. The
right-thinkers cite this from the Longmont Times-Call:
Said Udall, who lives in Eldorado Springs: 'Its
wonderful to be home.' He said Boulder County is 'home base
for me. This is the touchstone; this is where I take my
inspiration.'
Thus, they say, Udall is calling Boulder his
touchstone
and his home base.
However, in the
article Udall refers to Boulder County,
not
Boulder.
For all this tells us, he gets his
inspiration from the cornfields east of Longmont and finds
his touchstones at the quarries above Lyons.
The City of Boulder does have a reputation. Where else
would someone get fined $1,000 for making a poodle's hair
pink? Generally this gets spun as over-zealous
politically correct protection of companion animals from
essentially harmless activities that dingbat liberals
insist on criminalizing,
but this could also be
portrayed as Boulder is a bastion of law and order where
all offenses are taken seriously.
Boulder isn't the only designated liberal bastion.
During the 2006 state senate campaign in my district, there
were some Republican mutterings that Democrat Gail Schwartz
was an Aspen liberal,
though she lives in nearby
Snowmass. Aspen, like Boulder, has a reputation.
But are those reputations deserved? Using the 2004
presidential election results as a guide, Boulder County is
quite Democratic; John Kerry got 66.3 percent of the vote.
Pitkin County, home of Aspen, gave Kerry 68.4 percent. But
the most liberal county by this measure was San Miguel (its
seat is Telluride) at 71.6 percent, and Denver, at 69.6
percent, was also more liberal
than Boulder or
Aspen.
The question arises: Are there conservative counterparts?
Certainly there are parts of our state that regularly
trend rightward. But something like Colorado Springs
conservative
does not trip off the tongue the way
Boulder liberal
does. Besides, Colorado Springs just
came up with $53 million to bribe the U.S. Olympic
Committee into staying in town for 25 more years. True
conservatives would argue that if the city has money to
spend on such subsidies, then taxes are too high, and
should be lowered. I hope Rep. Doug Bruce weighs in on this
misuse of tax money in his own backyard.
As for other conservative strongholds, you never hear of
Springfield wingnuts,
Fort Morgan
red-staters,
or Meeker rightists.
Nobody ever
campaigns, at least state-wide, on Julesberg
principles
or Montrose morality.
With the geography card coming into play, why limit the deck to just Boulder and Aspen, when we have a big, diverse state that ranges from Gardner Communard Values to Cowdrey Second-Amendment Defenders? After all, it would be a refreshing change if Colorado politics were played with a full deck.
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