Archive for category Colorado Politics
Isenberg Doesn’t Run
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Denver Mayor, PPC on January 15th, 2011
According to the Denver Post, Sage Hospitality CEO Walter Isenberg has decided not to run in the upcoming Denver mayoral election. Isenberg would probably have tried to use the route that Hickenlooper pioneered: businessman who knows how to create jobs and understand financials. It would have been unique in this field of candidates, with all the other major candidates coming directly from government. There has been some discussion about the Denver Republican Party supporting a candidate for mayor this cycle, and Isenberg would have been probably the best thing we could find in Denver.
As it stands, Michael Hancock will likely pick up a fair amount of Republican support, and James Mejia will be able to run as the only candidate with recent executive experience, albeit entirely governmental.
The Chairman, the Party, and the Candidates
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC on January 14th, 2011
After the election, Dick Wadhams sent out an email discussing the role of the party in vetting candidates for office. Dick was roundly criticized for the mess that the Republican side of the governor’s race became, largely for his failure to properly “vet” candidates for that office. He makes the point – rightly – that the people who are criticizing him for not vetting the candidates are the same ones who saw him as Bismarck in the last cycle, maneuvering everywhere, with any lack of maneuvering all the more evidence for his Machiavellian schemes.
The Party is not Dick Wadhams. The party is everyone who shows up at caucus, assembly, convention, or primary. The reason we have a caucus and a primary is exactly to vet the candidates, to see their strengths and weaknesses, to ask hard questions, to see how they’ll react to a long campaign, and to learn more about them. The party chairman should tell a candidate for statewide office that a bankruptcy can’t be hidden and will be terminal. Most would also look unkindly at a chairman substituting his judgment for that of the candidate or the party.
Neither should the party elders substitute their judgment for that of the party. I largely blame them for the mess of a nomination process. No amount of vetting could have uncovered the “plagiarism” by Scott McInnis. That was deliberately leaked, for personal reasons by people inside the party, at a time when it could do the most damage. And McInnis’s ham-handed handling of the charge kept him from recovering from it.
Had Josh Penry still been in the race, even for a few months, even with all his flaws, had the party elders simply sat back and waited to see how things played out, rather than trying to pick the nominee before the caucuses, it might have been a different story. Because ultimately, the embarrassment didn’t come from McInnis not being vetted, but from Maes not being vetted. Few who used him as a protest vote wanted him to win the nomination. McInnis never felt threatened enough to do any digging. But in a race between McInnis and Penry, each would have needed some of Maes’s votes, and at least one would have made sure that the party knew who this guy was.
A couple of months ago, in the wake of the election, I heard a senior party member, a former officeholder, tell a group of activists that he hoped that the presidential nomination would be settled by the South Carolina primary. Coloradoans would have little say in the process aside from what checks they could write before, say, November of this year. Having learned nothing from the governor’s race, this fellow was prepared to repeat his errors nationally.
In retrospect, it’s clear that the party’s nomination process for governor was broken, and that it had considerable outside help in getting that way. Whether that was Dick’s fault or not depends on what you consider to be the proper role of the party chairman. Dick reads his job description largely as that of a mechanic; largely non-ideological, although you want him to be on your side.
The party chairman is no longer the guy with the biggest cigar in the smoke-filled room. Changes in campaign finance laws mean that the party machine plays little if any role in branding the party. That comes from the candidates. And the candidates meet directly with the party bosses, the ones who’ll fund their campaigns, rather than going through the party hierarchy to get there.
The genius of The Blueprint isn’t just that they throw a lot of money at key races. It’s that they coordinate their limited resources as a team, so they are, by and large, not working at cross-purposes, spending money to defeat each other, or duplicating effort. The outside groups, the Tea Parties, the affiliated groups, the business lobbies, the taxpayer watchdogs, and the groups with specific policy agendas all need to be cajoled into working together to defeat Democrats.
Leadership of that team needs to come from somewhere, and if the party chairman can’t do it – and Pat Waak has shown that he needn’t – then someone outside the party hierarchy needs to play that role.
Business-Friendly?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Business, Colorado Politics, PERA, PPC on January 14th, 2011
Governor Hickenlooper (and boy, that need to be in the editor clipboard) has signalled a desire to be more “pro-business.” There’s a reason for that:
It’s already bad enough that the US has the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. We also know that jobs tend to flow from blue states to red ones, and Colorado has a lot of red states surrounding it.
Kim Strassel has a fine piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about how the red-state governors of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio are already taking advantage of Illinois’s addiction to self-destructive behavior by luring businesses away. There are some limits; it’s
unlikely that Gary, Indiana, a joke since Meredith Wilson’s time, will be able to replicate Chicago’s freight infrastructure. But there’s no good reason why businesses can’t relocate to Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Santa Fe, or Texas. (Cheyenne, you say? Well, yes. It made news last year when a large computer server farm, dedicated to some environmental purpose or another, relocated there to get away from Colorado’s high electricity rates.) Minnesota also isn’t so far away, and the new Republican majority up there may be enough to override Governor Dayton’s apparent intent to fumble this opportunity for his state.
Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and Texas all rank higher on the Tax Foundation’s Business Tax Climate Rankings (http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22661.html). Nevada could be a nice stop for Californians looking to defect. The aforementioned Minnesota ranks 43rd, another reason they could be looking to improve.
And remember that “business-friendly” doesn’t necessarily mean “market-friendly,” or “growth-friendly.” Success at nurturing large businesses could come at the expense of small ones, which may or may not be more mobile. The hunger to lure larger defectors from California could mean subsidies at the expense of the rest of us.
Mayor Hickenlooper has already succeeded in driving business out of Denver to the surrounding cities, through software taxes, the head tax, and regulatory snarl. He’ll face similar pressures from his base to repeat that performance as governor. Let’s hope he realizes that other states will be willing to capitalize on that error.
Reflections on Speech and Speeches
Posted by Joshua Sharf in CD-1, Health Care, PPC on January 14th, 2011
Enabled by the excuse of being temporarily dislocated, I also decided to wait until the dust had settled on the Arizona shootings to comment on them, and on the political reaction to them. It seemed to me better to wait, rather than jump in with all sorts of assumptions of the kind that have justly earned so many commentators on the left the disdain of most Americans. Now, with things having settled down, I can safely put pen to pixel.
I’m pleased that Obama gave the speech he did, rather than the one we were afraid he would. The audience’s behavior was atrocious, the fact that public officials rather than religious figures quoted the Bible was regrettable, and the administration bears responsibility for the program. But all that doesn’t tell us anything new.
Obama’s speech itself did rise to the occasion, and I’ll refer people to Ross Kaminsky’s analysis here. All of that said, there’s no particular reason to believe that it was sincere. After all, it’s easy to call off the game when your side it getting creamed, and that’s largely what happened here. If the President could score a few harmless points off people who’ll support him anyway, and by doing so, appear to move to the center on a matter of optics rather than policy, it was little more than a smart political move. He gets some points for abandoning a shrill attack machine in its tracks. Let’s not forget that he helped create that machine, and that it had apparently thrown a rod and was leaking oil all over the road.
Among the worst offenders was our own Representative Diana DeGette, who used an appearance on KOA on Monday afternoon to try to link the shooting to ObamaCare. She argued that Speaker Boehner had taken a large step, doing the right thing by lowering the temperature of the political debate, by putting off the ObamaCare repeal vote. The vote was, according to her, “controversial,” “not going anywhere,” and, “intended to appease the Republican base.” This comment just about encapsulates DeGette’s unworthiness to represent us in Congress.
The vote, in fact, isn’t all that controversial -60% of voters consistently support repeal. Which means that the Senate’s vote to keep ObamaCare in place, or more likely, its vote to kill repeal in committee and prevent a floor vote at all, is the real base-pandering going on here. If we stipulate – for the purposes of discussion – that it’s a symbolic vote, then it ought not be controversial at all. Controversy is what happens when you actually seek to pass a wildly unpopular bill into law, and what you seek to avoid by doing so at midnight on a Saturday.
The same interview saw DeGette claim that despite protests at her home, her church, her office (I’ve lived near DeGette for 13 years and can’t remember any newsworthy protests at her house), she bravely soldiers on, meeting with voters as before. That, at least, is undoubtedly true, as her only town hall appearance during the health care debate was by telephone.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that, essentially, there was nothing at stake here for the President and his party. They continued to bull ahead pushing the health care overhaul despite its obvious unpopularity because the prize – nationalizing health care – was worth an election defeat, even a shellacking. Here, they were launching a major PR offensive to score what would, in military terms, be a minor objective in a long campaign. They may love censors and hate guns, but the FCC will or won’t try to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine anyway, and even the state where the attacks took place seems uninterested in revising its Vermont-style concealed carry.
But the campaign against self-protection and for “civility” by the Left isn’t over, it’s just looking for a better fight to pick, and the President signalled that, as well. If a supposed lack of civility by the right didn’t cause or encourage this attack, then the attack, by definition, can’t provide us any lessons in the importance of civility. And restraining my speech in response is an offense against society, not a protection of it. If Arizona law would have permitted the family to keep an obviously unstable man off the streets, then restraining my right to carry a weapon on that basis is likewise an offense against society, not a protection of it. (And if Arizona law didn’t permit that, then it ought have.)
We may allow the President his moment of appearing Presidential. We ought not allow that to obscure the very real, very menacing agenda his party still holds.
UPDATE: I have been informed that Representative DeGette did indeed hold at least one live, in person, townhal during the health care debate. It was called at the last minute, and timed to coincide with a large anti-ObamaCare rally at the state capitol. Holding a townhall on the most contentious issue of your tenure at a time when you know that most of those hostile to your position will be otherwise occupied is hardly the most courageous stand for a member of Congressional leadership to take.
Well, There’s Unions, And Then There’s Unions
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Colorado Politics, PPC on January 5th, 2011
When John Hickenlooper was running for Governor, he touted his business experience, and sold himself as a socially-liberal, fiscally-conservative, pro-business candidate. If true, even in an environment favorable to Republicans, with a viable candidate, that package is an appealing one. Unfortunately, as many of us predicted, it’s not true.
Governor-Elect Hickenlooper’s choice of political-labor activist Ellen Golombek to head the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment is the latest example. It’s not merely that Ms. Golombek runs the labor arm of the Colorado Democracy Alliance, the so-called Progressives’ political machine. It’s that she has a long history with the SEIU, the most political of labor unions, and one closely associated with public employees unions. By doing so, Hicklenlooper has put himself on the wrong side of the public on one of the central issues of state governance facing us today.
Remember that Gov. Ritter essentially unionized state workers, who started getting AFSCME cards in the mail, whether or not they had requested them. There was little interest on the part of state workers in actually joining AFSCME, though. I think we can count on Golombek using her position to actively promote union membership among state employees. While Colorado WINS apparently stopped tweeting and posting to its website, that may have been in preparation for exactly such an appointment.
It’s those unions, and their ability, through the electoral process (and in Colorado, through ballot measures), to help write their work rules and select the people they negotiate with, who are largely responsible for the impending fiscal crises in California, New York, and Illinois, with other states soon to follow. Estimates are that across the country, public pensions are $3,000,000,000,000 in the hole, and the same unions that negotiated these sweetheart deals are now crying foul when anyone tries to rein them in. Of course, what’s unfair is not attempts to treat the public fisc responsibly, but the fact that many of us will never be able to retire because of the taxes collected to pay for the 2nd-half-of-life scholarships for bureaucrats who put in 25 years, largely telling us how to run our homes and businesses.
The presence of large pots of government-controlled money has its dangers, as well. Subject to politicization, as in the California pension plan, the management of these portfolios can start investing more in the interests of their political patrons than in the interest of the beneficiaries and taxpayers.
Public pensions are, of course, only one manifestation of the problem of public unions. Work slowdowns, like the one that likely took place during the recent New York snowstorm, are effective because of work rules the unions have negotiated making it virtually impossible to fire anyone for incompetence or performance. This avoids the PATCO response, where the air traffic controllers struck in open defiance of the law. The moral indignation of New Jersey teachers when asked to contribute even small amounts to their own health insurance or retirement also shows the sense of entitlement that the culture of public unions engenders.
Fortunately, people are starting to notice, even unions.
William McGurn notes this in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:
These days the two types of worker inhabit two very different worlds. In the private sector, union workers increasingly pay for more of their own health care, and they have defined contribution pension plans such as 401(k)s. In this they have something fundamental in common even with the fat cats on Wall Street: Both need their companies to succeed.
By contrast, government unions use their political clout to elect those who set their pay: the politicians. In exchange, these unions are rewarded with contracts whose pension and health-care provisions now threaten many municipalities and states with bankruptcy. In response to the crisis, government unions demand more and higher taxes. Which of course makes people who have money less inclined to look to those states to make the investments that create jobs for, say, iron workers, electricians and construction workers.
Private sector unions have been most effective when they have confined themselves to collective bargaining for wages, hours, and working conditions. Public sector unions, almost by definition, see their role as part of a larger, leftist political program that is ultimately at odds with the healthy economy that private workers need. Given that private unions have, for the most part, shriveled into irrelevance, the alliance with public sector unions seems to benefit private unions mostly through laws allowing them to strongarm workers into unionize against the wishes of the majority. The 2010 election results will, however, put most of those legislative efforts on hold, possibly forcing the private sector unions to re-examine the value of this alliance.
Make no mistake. Private-sector unions will continue to work to elect Democrats, and will continue to put boots on the ground in urban and suburban elections to make sure that happens. But on specific issues, particularly public-sector pensions and benefits, it’s possible that governing Republicans can make allies of them in their efforts to rein in spending, and that private sector unions can put pressure on Democrats to go along, forcing officeholders to choose between factions in their coalition.
Remind Me Again, Who Paid For This House?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC, Property Rights on December 31st, 2010
The Denver Post reported earlier this week that someone who bought a house – and the land it sits on – managed to retain the right to demolish it and build a new house. Gary Yourtz bought a nice, mid-century modern house at 825 S. Adams St. for $1.1 million, planning to raze the place and build a house he wanted to live in. Using a law designed for historic preservation, neighbors filed an application for landmark designation on his home 15 minutes before the deadline. Now, Yourtz’s lawyers are $18,000 richer, but he has the right to do what he wants with his property.
Of the two complainants, one, Susan Livingston, lives in Belcaro, the neighborhood where the house is. The other, Mitch Cowley, doesn’t even live in Denver County, yet asserts a property right over a house he likes to look at. By his logic, I have at least some right to go around dynamiting the vast majority of Denver’s public “art.” (Actually, come to think of it, some sort of citizen petition process on these eyesores wouldn’t be a bad idea.) Denver has hundreds, perhaps thousands of these houses, and I’m sure if Mr. Cowley is driving miles and miles out of his way to see this one, there are others he can learn to love.
There’s a principle in historical research that thing used are not preserved, while those preserved are not used. There’s no reason to believe that what holds for households shouldn’t also hold for houses. Eventually, these preserved buildings will appeal to a narrower and narrower slice of owner, until they turn into museums. Again, I have no problem with preserving some of these buildings. I’m not a big fan of HOAs, but if Belcaro homeowners want to get together and sign off on never changing their homes, they can do so. It’s their own rights they’re signing away, and anyone buying the house can do so knowing the rules.
More Lefty Back to the Future
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Colorado Politics, Denver, PPC, Transportation on December 22nd, 2010
Of all the ideas for public transportation, one of the nuttiest to take hold in recent years is to revive streetcars. They have all the disadvantages of light rail, on a small scale. These include inflexibility and large capital costs. They carry a few more people than buses, but no faster, and are more expensive to build and maintain. They offer virtually unlimited opportunities for graft in the form of routing and station location. They offer the additional benefit of being anti-car while not replacing enough bus service to reduce traffic. In short, they’re a bureaucrat’s dream, a union’s gravy train, a taxpayer’s nightmare, and a commuter’s inconvenience. No wonder the Left loves them. (See the numbers here, pages 19 & 20.)
The Federal government has awarded Denver $2 million to continue to study such a boondoggle from the State Capitol out to the Fitzsimmons campus. Of course, for the Feds this is chump change, seeing as they’ve already funded over $300 million of your money for other cities to build these things (p. 48 & 51). That same presentation has several different proposals for lines east of Civic Center, costing between $100 million and $175 million.
For that, we won’t replace buses, but will allow politicians and political appointees to collect their share in graft. We won’t make traffic and better, and will likely make it worse. When neighborhoods change, we’ll have to lay more track instead of just re-routing bus lines. All in all, the $2,000,000 alone would pave a lot of roads, but the $175,000,000 of the largest project would pave a lot more, and repair a fair number of bridges as well.
If after all that, for some reason, you’re still nostalgic for streetcars, you shouldn’t go away empty-handed:
Did Colorado Republicans Really Outperform Democrats?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC on December 21st, 2010
Since the election, Colorado Republican Chairman Dick Wadhams, who has still officially not announced for re-election, has been regularly sending out emails defending his and the state party’s performance during the campaign season. In particular, he has addressed two issues that are not always clearly understood: vetting, and the role of the party’s turnout operations. I’ll save vetting for another post, because there are some worrisome signs that the Old Bulls of the party have learned nothing from this cycle, and it deserves a separate treatment. For the moment, let’s talk about turnout operations.
Now, before I start, I want to make it clear that I’m not here to defend or attack Dick’s overall performance as party chairman. Dick was personally very supportive during my 2008 run, and financially supportive at the beginning of the 2010 campaign. It’s for that reason among others that I want to stay clear of personalities. He’s more than capable of speaking for himself and defending his own record with its considerable accomplishment. He doesn’t need me to do that.
Now Dick’s answer to the question I pose in the title is a resounding, “Yes!” He points to the large edge that Republicans had in turnout. In a state with about as many registered Dems as Republicans, many more Republicans turned out to vote. Dick would argue that that turnout edge may not have been enough to save Ken Buck, but did provide the edge in the other statewide races, and took back the State House of Representatives. He draws a line – traditionally correct – between the party’s job to turn out its voters and the candidate’s job to persuade unaffiliated voters.
And by that standard, the party succeeded and the candidates – all of them, except for John Suthers – failed. Because the only way you get a 100,000 vote edge in turnout and win by substantially less than that is if the unaffiliated voters turn against you. In this case, they turn against you radically and decisively in a way that’s not predicted in any poll leading up to the election.
I believe that the Democrat turnout effort was focused not only on registered Democrats, but also on Democrat-voting unaffiliated voters. That the Left – not just the Democrat party – has done a better job of identifying, contacting, engaging, and recruiting those unaffiliated voters who lean their way than we have, while we are content with robocalls to right-leanings U’s in the weeks leading up to the election. I believe that their focus on social networking and social media, both on their own sites and on larger social networking sites, has helped them identify these voters.
It is also true that, for the moment, the Democrats can call on the foot soldiers of the labor unions to go walk precincts on Election Day, which provides them with an advantage in that regard. But this is not new, and there is no reason we can’t develop our own sources of manpower.
What I am seeing from the State party is a lack of constructive self-criticism, instead focusing on what went well, rather than on how the game has changed and what the proper responses to it are. The Republicans are playing checkers, and the Democrats are playing three-dimensional chess, and we had better hope that the answer to the above question is a decisive, “No.” Otherwise, we have pretty much lost the middle permanently, and are looking not at the middle of a comeback, but at a high-water mark. I don’t believe that’s true; there’s almost no polling that supports that thesis. But we’ve probably come as far as we can with the old model of how things work.
Colorado Misses Out On Another Wave
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Colorado Politics, Energy, PPC on December 20th, 2010
The Wall Street Journal reports that resource-rich states are recovering quite well from the recession:
Wages of workers in 10 states and the District of Columbia have more than regained ground lost during the recession, with the recovery concentrated in regions benefitting from the commodities boom and federal spending.
Many of the laggards, meanwhile, are states where the housing bust hit hard or where the collapse of the auto industry and other old-line manufacturing pulled down wages during the slump, according to a Commerce Department figures released Friday.
That Colorado is a resource-rich state can hardly be doubted. We have coal and natural gas in abundance, minor metals like molybdenum, potentially uranium. While real estate has suffered, we never had the kind of overbuilding seen in Florida, Arizona, or southern California, so we never had the kind of collapse, and manufacturing hasn’t been a mainstay of the Colorado economy for a while.
So why aren’t we recovering? Why is the state’s unemployment up to 8.8%, with only modest improvements projected (for whatever that’s worth)? Well it’s true that, unlike DC, northern Virginia, and suburban Maryland, we lack the ability to coerce the rest of the country to pay for our standard of living. But more importantly, the outgoing Ritter administration and its Democrat allies have waged an ongoing war against the exploitation of our natural resources.
I don’t want to see the state return to the boom-bust cycle that characterizes an economy overwhelmingly dependent on drilling and mining. But Colorado is clearly suffering from a national policy -seemingly unique in the industrialized world, and reinforced by state government – of refusing to exploit natural resources that our economy actually depends on.
Those Darned Ballot Initiatives II
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC on November 9th, 2010
A final word on 60, 61, and 101. They violated two basic rules of drawing political lines – 1) create contrasts, and 2) make sure that more people are on your side of that contrast. These were written in such a way that even true fiscal conservatives didn’t believe they could support them. Which meant that not only didn’t they get passed, they passed up an opportunity to let the Republican candidates define differences between themselves and their opponents.
In the Wall Street Journal:
The ballot measures mirror tea-party goals. So Natalie Menten, who runs the proponents’ campaign, expected lots of help from the movement.
She didn’t get it.
A large majority of Colorado’s elected officials, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged voters to reject the measures as too extreme. The opposition raised millions from businesses and unions for ads warning that the measures would kill jobs and strip funding from schools, roads and prisons.
In the face of such forceful opposition, many tea-party activists stepped aside to focus on other priorities, such as state legislative races.
“It does disappoint me,” Ms. Menten said. “It tells me they want to go out to the capitol and hold up a sign” but not take real action.
No. They took real action. They got involved in campaigns they believed they could win.
Now, look at what happened in Arizona. Two years ago, they rejected (barely) a ballot initiative that would have made sure that people could always purchase their own health care. This year, they passed an Amendment 63 look-alike.
Here’s an idea. Two years ago, we barely killed a right-to-work initiative, and an initiative to get rid of affirmative action in public hiring and contracting. This year, we came within a few points of neutralizing Obamacare here.
Why not take a page from the lefty handbook, and try these again? Better yet, why not think about how the initiatives will help get people elected by clarifying differences, coordinating ballot initiatives with electoral politics, rather than falling in love with whatever new idea we come up with in the interim?
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