Colorado political frustration
Is it just my jaded view or are we suffering from a serious lack of talent among those who manage Colorado political campaigns? I’m speaking in particular of the Republican side, since I don’t know the Democrats (and don’t really care to.)
What does it say about the ability of those who run Republican campaigns when probably the best campaign so far is Ken Buck’s, and most of the damage he has done to Jane Norton (whom I have endorsed) has been done by surrogates who the campaign claims have been acting totally independently?
I’m a big fan of Josh Penry’s but I fear that he’s hurting his political future in the state. Whether he likes it or not, the Buck people are successfully making the campaign to a substantial part about Josh (and to a lesser degree about Norton staffer Cinamon Watson). Yes, it’s because the direct arguments against Jane Norton are weak, but it seems to me that the Norton campaign has been doing more explaining than the Buck campaign. As one of my smartest political friends says, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing." Of course, it’s not unique to Josh Penry or any other high-profile campaign manager that people love a winner. So any damage to Josh’s reputation will be inversely proportional to Jane’s electoral succcess; Jane and Josh’s political fortunes are somewhat tied at the hip now. I hope they both succeed – I think they’re both excellent – but I’d be foolish not to be concerned right now.
On the other hand, many of Buck’s cheerleaders have been so shrill and over-the-top with bogus criticisms of Norton that I have to wonder if they will start to reflect badly on their man. (There is, to be sure, at least one particularly annoying and ineffective Norton supporter who uses an exclamation point after every sentence while spouting nonsense about secret information she has which is damaging to Ken Buck.)
Norton’s new anti-Buck radio ad, which you can hear below (if the player shows up on your web page), seems like it might be effective.
The case at issue is interesting. Ken Buck declined to prosecute a case against a pawn shop owner who seemed to be distributing guns to criminals. In the end, the US Attorney prosecuted anyway and only got a misdemeanor conviction, which would seem to vindicate Buck’s basic point. However, Buck’s other actions surrounding the case really do strike me as unethical and worthy of the official reprimands he received. From a Westword article on the case:
The Post focuses on a gun case involving a pawn shop owned by Gregory and Leonid Golyansky. Buck, who says he knew Gregory Golyansky from Republican Party events, didn’t push for charges against the brothers circa the late ’90s under U.S. Attorney Henry Solano. Moreover, when Tom Strickland, Solano’s successor, tried to revive the case, Buck reportedly recommended several attorneys who might be able to represent the Golyanskys to a third party, state senator Shawn Mitchell. He also told the one of the lawyers chosen, Stephen Peters, about a memo he’d written to a colleague, future controversy magnet Stephanie Villafuerte, suggesting that the evidence in the matter was weak.
It’s one thing for Buck to refuse to prosecute a case. It’s another thing entirely for him to try to torpedo the government’s case when his superiors decide to go ahead with prosecution. That’s a serious problem.
That said, it seems like Buck is routinely getting the better of the spin with the help of Walt Klein.
All in all, both campaigns strike me as relatively weak and it’s only because Senator Michael “Who?” Bennet is such a disaster that I still expect either one to be able to beat him (and I will work to help whichever of them is the nominee become the next senator from Colorado.)
Maybe I’m being a little too harsh. Maybe it’s extremely difficult to run a campaign against an opponent whose views on policy issues are almost the same as your own candidate’s views. But even allowing for that, it’s very hard for me to look at these campaigns and say we have a team that can and should be running one of the most important races in the nation.
And for Republicans, these two weak campaigns are the good news, at least in comparison to the GOP race between Scott McInnis and Dan Maes for the gubernatorial nomination.
McInnis, whom I’ve met with briefly, seems reasonably intelligent and personable, but also very much like a politician (in a not-too-complimentary sense of the word.) Much more so than either Norton or Buck, and I presume more so than Maes who has never held public office.
McInnis, while not an inspiring candidate, should nevertheless have knocked Maes out of the contest weeks or months ago. Yet somehow, the McInnis campaign allowed Maes to outmaneuver them and get a 1% victory at the assembly, giving Maes the top line on the primary ballot. It’s truly unbelievable that a candidate with almost no name recognition and no money was able to do that against a modestly well-funded former Congressman. It says a lot of bad things about the McInnis campaign and will end up hurting McInnis when he wins the nomination, which I still believe he will.
I’m rather surprised that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper continues to poll so poorly against McInnis given how weak McInnis’ campaign has been. It says a lot about how poisonous a year this is likely to be for tax-raising “Progressive” Democrats which people are coming to understand that Hickenlooper is, despite his moderate nice-guy facade.
So, like in the Senate race, I expect the Republican candidate to win the general election despite himself and his campaign.
But why is it that we have such an apparent dearth of talent here in Colorado. One would think that Dick Wadhams, a giant-killer himself, would be able to recruit some capable operatives for this critical battleground state.
Back to Penry. I think he’s an unbelievably smart and crafty guy, though actually running a campaign may be slightly outside his wheelhouse. I wish he were still running for governor. I’d work my heart out for the guy. The question is why the most important race in the state would need to hire Penry so late in the game to run the campaign. And why does the likely nominee for the second most important race (governor) lose the assembly to a no-name, no-money wannabe? It’s as if we’re playing in the big leagues using coaches from Double-A ball.
I hope that the people running campaigns for Ryan Frazier and Cory Gardner are better than the apparent Colorado average. It’s easily imaginable that Ed Perlmutter and Betsey Markey can be beaten; they should be beaten, Markey perhaps more easily than Perlmutter given the heavier weighting of Republican registration in the 4th CD than the 7th CD. These are races, however, where the opponents are going to be harder to beat than either Bennet or Hickenlooper, and therefore won’t be able to get by on the fumes of existing anti-Democrat sentiment without also running a good campaign.
To be clear, I don’t know if the talent on the Democrat side is any better. A ham sandwich could win in 2008 running as a Democrat, and the reverse may be true in 2010. (After all, Cary Kennedy is the political equivalent of a ham sandwich.) It may be that their campaign-running bench is as weak as the Republicans’, but I sure wouldn’t want to bet control of the Senate or of our state government on it.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Rossputin on 06/30/10 at 05:37:57 am . Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. |
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06/30/10 @ 07:18:28 am
You are right on the button. I'm growing increasingly concerned about the field and the ability of them to overcome some serious campaigning in October. Combine fear of the media with weak-kneed conservativism and I'm not sure how they hold it together.
06/30/10 @ 10:16:08 am
Well, Ross, welcome to the brave new world of tea-partying. For better or worse (and I think it is almost always better), you're seeing good, conservative candidates with surprising challenges from more conservative candidates like Buck and Maes. In other years, Norton and McInnis could have easily put down solid challenges from the right. There are two keys, though, that signal what kind of a strange year this is. First. conservatives feel betrayed and therefore less beholden to the GOP. It makes an insurgent conservative candidacy a lot easier. Second, conservatives do feel empowered to "beat the establishment," even though that usually means setting up a strawman (or woman) and remaking them as the liberal that they never were. All of that said, I'm hopeful that both Norton and McInnis will win the primary and I do think that they both will win election. At least, let's hope so.
06/30/10 @ 10:21:23 am
Thanks for the comment, Chris. It's not as if I haven't seen rough campaigns before. It's just that even when they were rough, they seemed smarter and better-run.
I agree with your "two keys". Given those, what gives you hope that Jane Norton will win the primary?
06/30/10 @ 11:28:30 am
I think that Norton will win because I'm not at all convinced that Ken Buck is monopolizing support among the conservative grassroots (nor is Dan Maes, for that matter, in the gubernatorial race). Polls and the general sense of things do indicate that, among the more conservative activists in the party, Buck is winning. But the Colorado Republican Party is a lot wider and deeper than the comment sections of many conservative blogs. I don't mean that as a slight against Colorado's conservative blogosphere, a tool that I utilize and enjoy almost daily. And I am a Norton supporter so I might just be viewing things with tinted lenses, but the sense I get talking to conservatives is that, while Ken Buck is a good man and a stellar conserative, Jane Norton is also a reliable, strong, and compelling conservative candidate who is, perhaps most significantly, a much better candidate in the general election.
And, more practically, I think that Josh Penry is right that the mail-in primary will help Norton. She is a more recognizable figure to people, and if there is a boost in primary participation as most think there will be, that means that a lot of Republicans only marginally affiliated with "the grassroots" will probably vote for Norton simply because of name recognition. Were this not a mail ballot primary, I do think that Buck would win.
06/30/10 @ 11:28:40 am
Yes, the Tea Party has messed up the establishment, and maybe to the detriment of the GOP, but not the citizenry. The initial Republican Party was not run very well either. It takes time and experience. The plan is not to get it absolutely right 100% of the time the first time out, but to be responsive to the people and their issues. That will by nature be messy and difficult to control. But, with time, perhaps the Tea Party will evolve enough to become as unresponsive and insulated as the Republican and Democratic Parties are today.
06/30/10 @ 02:51:02 pm
Ross,
In the March 16 caucuses there was a 97% correlation between Buck support and Maes support. The reason that Norton lost and McInnis won in the March caucuses was that Cleve Tidwell and Tom Wiens took about 20% of the votes so that Buck edged out Norton. Tidwell and Wiens siphoned off McInnis supporters who didn't have strong conviction about Norton and these same people didn't stand up and say they wanted to be a county or state delegate. Because of that, Maes got a huge boost (from 40% to 49.5%) in the attenuating pool of delegates. It is also possible that people held their nose about McInnis because they just didn't know Maes.
I personally have met Maes and really like his chances in the primary. People who support him are strong supporters, while people who support McInnis are statistically less strong as measured by their propensity to vote and seek further elevation to County delegate and State Delegate positions.
I think that Buck will win in the primary and Maes will win in the primary because of this trend, and because people have an instinctive sense that Norton and McInnis are "establishment" folks. Michelle Malkin's piece against Norton was widely distributed around Candidate Forums that I attended and it swayed almost everyone who read it that I was able to talk to about it.
Support for Buck and Maes is a repudiation of the Republican Establishment and the correlation and the vote trends in the caucus process supports that conclusion in my never to be humble opinion.
As far as the Buck reprimand, I think that the fact that he telegraphed the Government's weak position in the case against the pawnshop owner is actually a huge vote in his favor - the responsibility of government lawyers is not to act to win, it is instead to act in the public interest. In my view, distribution of firearms by pawnshop owners is no damn business of the Feds and the US Supreme Court vindicated that view yet again earlier this week.
The fact that the reprimand started under a Clinton Appointee and finalized under Suthers merely indicates that Suthers wasn't in a position to reverse the reprimand as the reprimand process was a technical bureaucratic one rather than taken in the public interest along the overarching 2nd amendment rights issue on which I think Buck was acting.
I respect your support of Norton and hope more than ever that the Republicans get their stuff together and 1) pick true conservatives and 2) WIN.
07/03/10 @ 04:30:22 am
Joe H: "As far as the Buck reprimand, I think that the fact that he telegraphed the Government's weak position in the case against the pawnshop owner is actually a huge vote in his favor - the responsibility of government lawyers is not to act to win, it is instead to act in the public interest."
You nailed it dead, solid perfect, Joe: Ross seems to be laboring under the delusion of authoritarianism. "If John RINO Suthers said it, it must be true." No real knock on Ross: We all have our blind spots.
Who does an assistant U.S. Attorney work for: the people, or the political hack du jour running the office? Buck should have wrecked his boss' case. If you have ever had to battle the remorseless hand of our hopelessly corrupt and soul-less Democrat-run government, you would see things differently. Try asking Tim Masters. Or better yet, try asking our own Dan Maes (who knows what it's like to be a whistle-blower) or DA Carol Chambers (who knows what it's like to be the target of a politically motivated prosecution). If you knew what it's like to be on their radar, you would sing Ken Buck's praises to the sky, and wish that someone like that had been there for you.
More importantly, in Berger, the Supreme Court saw it our way:
"The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done."
I have a moral compass that won't allow me to follow orders blindly, and my only loyalty is to the Constitution -- not my Party or my superior. Further, I would submit that our public servants work for us. Whenever a Tom Strickland or an Alberto Gonzales or a Mary Mullarkey goes rogue (remember the Manzanares scandal?), their underlings have a duty to call them on it. Period. As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist #78:
"There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid."
Correct me if I am wrong here, Ross, but to the best of my knowledge, the Attorney General is not free to indulge in political prosecutions -- although that did appear to be a standard operating procedure in the Bush #43 Administration (e.g., Cyril Wecht, Don Siegelman), a practice I strongly abjure. I have a problem with files disappearing in the Eagle County court system under Mark Hurlbert's watch. Wrong is wrong, irrespective of which Party is in power.