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Expect a Flawed Governor

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A 2010 Republican Survival PlanBy John Andrews

With reluctance, I will cast no vote for the office of Governor of Colorado in this year's general election. The choices are so unsatisfactory that I cannot in good conscience put my moral weight behind any of them. When my fellow citizens have made their choice on Nov. 2, no matter who wins, our state will be looking at a seriously flawed claimant to head the executive branch for the next four years. I say this without personal disrespect to any of the candidates. And I am confident that our constitutionally resilient self-government will come through the next governor's term all right, just as we always have since 1876. But it will occur with this elector having abstained (which matters little to anyone else, I know).

Having known every Colorado governor since 1962, and having been the Republican nominee for governor in 1990, I have a good idea of what it takes to do the job, and a high standard for any individual I would support in seeking the job.

The candidate who earns my endorsement and vote must measure up on four C's: character, competence, conservative principles, and continuity of institutions.

A word of explanation about the fourth: it is inseparable from the third. Conservatives conserve; they don't impulsively improvise. When someone asks to be entrusted as chief executive in willful disregard of our two-party system because his persona and the momentary circumstance are so compelling, it's hard to see such a candidacy as genuinely conservative. And so it's hard to grant the candidate our trust.

Applying my four C's to the major contenders for governor in 2010, how does each man score?

John Hickenlooper, the Democrat, is certainly no conservative. I believe we'll also have reason to doubt his character when all the revelations of this, the Mayor's first-ever tough partisan race, are known.

Dan Maes, the Republican, talks conservative and competent, but the super-salesman does not talk straight. The shine has worn off all his pretensions, raising grave questions of integrity.

Tom Tancredo, the ex-Republican now running as an independent (borrowing the American Constitution party line), doesn't put up a reassuring score on any of these four criteria either. Hearing of his crack about elbowing aside Lincoln himself if necessary, it seemed my old friend had somehow become a different person -- a person I'm sadly unable to vote for.

Splitting the Colorado Republican Party in order to rescue it (and ostensibly rescue the state) from an unusually deficient gubernatorial nominee has overtones of the misguided warrior who burned down the village in order to save it. The "rescue" appears likely to worsen our state's governance in the long run, by encouraging freelance personality trips and factional power plays at the expense of fair competition for the political center under rules that everyone accepts.

Maes would be a flawed governor, so would Hickenlooper -- but I prefer to risk 48 months of either one in power, rather than add momentum to a rule-or-ruin experiment with radical populism that could leave us with three (or eventually several) dysfunctional parties.

I look charitably upon fellow Republicans who reach a different conclusion from mine and actively support one or another of the candidates. I hope all of us who believe that the GOP, in most circumstances, governs best can build a firewall around our gubernatorial disagreement and discouragement in order to work aggressively for GOP victories in the legislature, constitutional offices, Congress, and US Senate. The opportunity 2010 presents, and the consequences of an all-ticket defeat, simply leave us no choice.

Expect a flawed governor. It's a certainty. Think long-term and prudentially, not impulsively. It's the conservative way. Cordon off the gubernatorial schism. It's fatal otherwise. And do our utmost, regardless of the Maes-Tancredo fight, to help other Colorado candidates ride the conservative tide and win. That's my 2010 Republican survival plan.

Eat healthy this election

(Denver Post, Sept. 5) “McInnis: A Jobs Governor,” say the bus benches and billboards that were to give the former GOP congressman a lift toward November after he won in August; only he lost. Still you see the slogan everywhere, as sad as a Christmas tree in spring, a reminder of how strange politics can be. Meanwhile the finalists for senator forge into fall with their own bizarre blemishes left over from summer – Democrat Michael Bennet alleged to have been a corporate looter, Republican Ken Buck scolded for joking that “I don’t wear high heels.” Has declining to cross-dress ever before been deemed politically insensitive? If such malefactors at the top of both tickets weren’t enough to make nonvoters of us all, my fellow Republicans have the opportunity to lose sleep over the shockingly moderate coloration of Tambor Williams, Maes’ designee for lieutenant governor. Becoming Light Guv is usually a disappearance sufficient to one’s face on a milk carton. But suddenly Ms. Williams, unlikely ever to take office and powerless if she did, was held up as my party’s bogeywoman of the center, sinister as Hillary Clinton. Come on.

Overall, it’s painfully evident that in 2010, even more than in most election years, few of us are going to get what we want. But can we at least get, as the self-help guru Mick Jagger once promised, what we need? I think so.

Suppose the campaign was a supermarket. You could breeze in for a Lotto ticket, a six-pack, and a gossip magazine – resulting tomorrow in the lottery not paying off, a hangover, and Brangelina as remote as before. This is the dreamy wish-fulfillment approach to elections that too many Americans, left and right, indulge in. Embarrassingly juvenile, really.

As grownups, though, you and I know better. We’re going to the store with a list, smart shoppers ready to turn last week’s earnings into next week’s eating. We’ll go easy on the junk food, heavy on the healthy stuff, and if the menu in coming days isn’t quite the banquet of our dreams, at least we’ve kept our self-reliance and our self-respect. We’re not chumps for anyone’s ad pitch.

Election Day will bring less frustration and more satisfaction (apologies to the Rolling Stones again), no matter where you’re located on the political spectrum, if you use Labor Day to make up your campaign shopping list in this fashion. The eight intervening weeks will also be less of an ordeal, because you’ll have a calm, cool sense of seeing through all the flimflam.

The aisles to avoid are the ones with entitlements, benefit goodies, borrowing from our kids, laws that play favorites, victimhood, appeasing aggressor, inflammatory wedge issues, hero-worship of my guys, demonizing the other guys, future scenarios with utopian fantasies or dystopian horrors. That stuff is junk no matter which party peddles it, and both sometimes do. It will only make a sick body politic sicker. Don’t even feed it to your dog.

Seeing through the flimflam isn’t the same as preventing it, of course. Some candidates and ballot issues perpetrating the above will win. Some opposed to it will lose. But your shopping list is good into 2011 and beyond, as a guide for holding all those darned politicians accountable. Do it!

And if your list includes the healthy restraints of divided government in Denver as well as Washington; the rebirth of competing media voices in our state; some soul-searching by Colorado Republicans and Democrats alike, after a sloppy show this year; a state Supreme Court chastened by voter vigilance; and a return to reality-based politics following the Obama euphoria of 2008 – well then, I can practically guarantee you a delicious, nutritious midnight supper on Nov. 2.

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