The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care)
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The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936218103 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado
And Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care
By Adam Schrager, Rob Witwer
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2010 Adam Schrager and Rob WitwerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936218-10-3
CHAPTER 1
Jared Polis: Colorado's Political Past Meets the Future — in Arizona
The sun had barely broken above the hills near Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, Arizona, and already they were out there stretching, throwing, and running. They wore black jerseys, white pants, and a silver-billed hat with the purple letters CR.
Colorado Rockies manager Clint Hurdle walked among them, joking and prodding about some missed assignment or broken play from the day before. Pitching coach Bob Apodaca talked mechanics with some of his pupils, using terms like "arm slot" and "quick feet."
There were dozens of men in the prime of their careers. Those careers just didn't happen to include baseball.
Rockies Fantasy Camp introduced CEOs, CPAs, and MDs to different acronyms, like RBIs and ERAs. But the session in February 2003, a week before spring training started, was unique.
Unlike years past, when men used to making headlines could learn the game from the experts without fear of publicity, this week would be chronicled by the Denver media. Reporters were there to follow the progress of the state's leading baseball fan and a former high school pitcher, Governor Bill Owens.
"I think he's been spending too much time in the office," Hurdle joked of the state's chief executive after he whiffed on a number of pitches during batting practice. "I just think he's a little nervous. I told him nobody gets released from Fantasy Camp, nobody gets sent down. There's no Triple A governorship that he's going to have to go to if he doesn't do well here."
* * *
Owens was certainly doing well in a different type of hardball. Just a few months earlier, the second-term Republican governor had won reelection with more than 64 percent of the vote, and he presided over one of the strongest state Republican establishments in the country.
"We controlled everything but the courts," said Alan Philp, a former executive director for the Colorado Republican Party. With a voter registration advantage hovering between 150,000 and 200,000 and strong party organization, the GOP was in good shape for the foreseeable future. "Nobody seriously thought Colorado was anything but a Republican-leaning state," Philp recalled.
This view was borne out at the ballot box. Of the state's seven congressional districts, only two — the Denver and Boulder seats — were held by Democrats. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1995, was the state's senior US senator, where he served with Republican Wayne Allard, who in 2002 handily defeated Democrat Tom Strickland for the second time in six years. At the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, the Colorado delegation enjoyed prime seating in the front row below the podium, reflecting the state's position as a bulwark in the Republican-friendly Rocky Mountain West.
In the state legislature, Republicans enjoyed a longstanding historical advantage, often controlling the state House and Senate by margins of two or more Republicans for every Democrat. In the past forty years, there were only three brief intervals when the GOP didn't control both chambers. The first was in 1964, when Democrats rode Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater to capture the state House. That lasted two years. In 1976, Watergate gave House Democrats another window of control. That, too, lasted just two years.
The only other taste of success for legislative Democrats was in 2000, and in retrospect it proved a harbinger of things to come. Ironically, that victory — capturing the Senate from 2000 to 2002 — was at least in part made possible by a former Republican state senator, Terry Considine. As part of the term-limits movement, Considine formed an organization called Coloradans Back in Charge to place term limits on the 1990 Colorado ballot.
Considine, who was profiled in publications like the National Review, was privately scorned by some of his legislative colleagues at home. But he thought two four-year terms for statewide officers and state senators and four two-year terms for state representatives should be more than enough time to accomplish their policy goals. It would de-professionalize politics, Considine argued, giving meaning to the term citizen legislature.
In November 1990, an overwhelming 71 percent of Colorado voters agreed. While the part of the amendment that related to members of Congress was later struck down by the US Supreme Court, the first wave of term-limited — and mostly Republican — state representatives and senators was set to leave office before the end of the decade.
Demographics brought 1 million people to Colorado in the 1990s — transplants from places like California, Texas, and the Midwest — who tended to be less rigid in their political affiliation. So while Republicans saw a policy victory in the success of term limits, Democrats saw that a window of opportunity would open in 1998, the year the new law officially kicked in.
The net effect of term limits was to create contested seats in districts that had previously been held by long-established Republican incumbents. Emboldened, Democratic leaders hatched a plan to retake the state Senate for the first time since John F. Kennedy was president.
"We had an all-out push in 2000," recalled Mike Feeley, the Senate minority leader. "We raised more money and took a more systematic approach. We were very selective about recruiting candidates."
Feeley's $1.5 million coordinated campaign was like nothing Democrats in Colorado had ever done before. There was a campaign manager in every targeted district. Messaging was tested and calibrated according to polling data. For once, Democrats weren't throwing darts at a board.
With the Colorado Education Association (CEA), Colorado's largest teacher's union, and the Colorado American Federation of Labor — Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) coordinating resources with the state party to focus on a few races in the western suburbs of Denver, Democrats entered Election Day with a hope they hadn't entertained before. One reporter called their last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts the "poster campaign for carpal tunnel syndrome" because of the phone banks they had set up.
Democrats focused their energy on the traditionally Republican stronghold of Jefferson County, in the suburbs west of Denver. There, three women in particular — Sue Windels, Joan Fitz-Gerald, and Deanna Hanna — seemed poised to take over historically GOP-leaning Senate seats. Other Democrats chafed at the lack of support they would receive during the 2000 cycle, but Feeley and his coalition had determined that this year it would all come down to those three women.
"People were very hesitant about funding because they didn't believe we could do it," said Ellen Golombek, who ran the field efforts for Colorado's AFL-CIO in 2000 and who is the outgoing national political and field director for Planned Parenthood. "We had to beg and scrape for the resources."
Hanna's race was called in her favor shortly after 10:00 pm, lifting spirits at the Election Day party at Denver's historic Oxford Hotel. "It's an emotional roller coaster," Feeley told reporters. "We're still waiting to confirm, but it looks really good. It looks really good."
Shortly before midnight, the Democrats got the news they were waiting for.
"Fitz-Gerald and Windels both just came in ... It's all over!" Feeley screamed to the crowd. "We're at eighteen! We won the majority!"
One of his Senate colleagues (and current US representative), Ed Perlmutter, grabbed a news photographer by the shoulders and mugged for the camera. "We're going to Disneyland!" he shouted.
To everyone involved in later Democratic successes, what happened in 2000 was essential.
"The Colorado Miracle was actually 2000," Golombek said. "One of the Republicans said something like, 'They played dirtier than we did. I didn't think they had it in them.' We didn't play dirty. We played honest — just brought out more facts than ever before."
Feeley, himself a casualty of term limits, concluded his eight years in the state Senate on a high note. "I went down swinging," he said with a laugh.
* * *
For Governor Owens, losing the Senate was a setback — and not one he was willing to accept, either. For the next two years, he worked with GOP leaders to ensure that the anomalous Democratic victory remained just that — an anomaly. With a ferocious effort, Republicans managed to recapture the Senate in 2002, albeit by a tenuous 18 — 17 margin.
Having beaten back the Democrats, Governor Owens was firmly in control of the Capitol. After his reelection, he was named "America's Best Governor" by the National Review. Republicans around the country noticed his success in cutting taxes, pushing for the country's first-ever simultaneous mass transit/highway expansion project, and an innovative education reform program that stressed accountability. He was even being discussed in some circles as a future presidential contender.
But if you asked him what his dream job was, it would have been to be at spring training for real, first as a player and then as a coach, manager, or even team owner.
At Fantasy Camp, Owens wore number seventeen in honor of Rockies first baseman Todd Helton, one of the team's best players and the one who could be found in the spotlight ever since being drafted in the first round by the franchise.
Like Helton would be the following week when spring training officially opened, Owens was mobbed. Everyone wanted to shake his hand, to play on his team, to offer a compliment.
"Wild Bill," Hurdle shouted while Owens worked on his pitching, "bringing the pain!" Owens wasn't a bad hitter either, posting a hefty .400 average for the week.
For the governor's part, he simply wanted to blend in, asking his fellow campers to call him Bill. "Down here, I'm just Bill." But from the sales executive who worried about "throwing inside" when the governor was batting to the umpires hired to work the games who knew "to give him the outside corner" when he was pitching, he might as well have been wearing a different-colored jersey.
The one person not in awe wore number four and was an avid Rockies fan himself, with prime season tickets right behind home plate. Twenty-seven-year-old Jared Polis was the vice chairman of the Colorado State Board of Education and an emerging factor in Colorado Democratic politics.
Growing up in San Diego, Polis fell in love with politics at a young age. When a developer tried to build homes where he and his brother played, Polis led the charge against the proposal at a city council meeting. He was eleven.
At sixteen, he headed off to Princeton, where he majored in political science and cofounded American Information Systems, an Internet service provider. While many of his classmates were drinking beer and getting ready to head off to Wall Street or law school, Polis spent his senior year on the road, drumming up financing for the company he would later sell for $20 million.
In the 1960s, Polis's parents formed a company called Blue Mountain Arts that sold poetry books and greeting cards. Recognizing the opportunities in the nascent dot-com space, Polis helped them create an online presence for the company, called BlueMountain.com. Although it wasn't profitable, three years later Excite@Home offered the family $700 million for it. Polis's personal take was an estimated $150 million, which he parlayed into another successful business venture, this one called ProFlowers. In 2005, Liberty Media Corporation bought ProFlowers and its parent company for $477 million.
Polis had joined Michael Dell, Tiger Woods, Jennifer Lopez, and Jeff Gordon on Fortune's list of "rich kids." With an estimated $174 million to his name, Polis had more money than Britney Spears at the peak of her popularity.
Still in his twenties, Polis now had a nest egg that would allow him to pursue his real passion — politics — for the rest of his life. In 2000, he ran for the State Board of Education, a part-time, unpaid panel that oversees the Colorado Department of Education.
State board races are traditionally sleepy, low-profile affairs, but Polis approached the campaign as he would a business, investing heavily in his product, in this case himself. He plowed an unheard-of $1 million into his campaign.
Polis's Republican opponent, former state senator Ben Alexander, spent about $10,000. "At one point," Alexander told Robert Frank, author of Richistan: A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich, "when I heard he was willing to spend $1 million, I thought of writing him a letter saying, 'Let's split it in half. You give me $500,000 and I promise I'll drop out.'"
Polis beat Alexander by ninety votes out of nearly 1.6 million cast.
On the state board, Polis didn't shy away from controversy. To the dismay of some in the educational establishment, he advocated for charter schools and even founded his own chain of charters called the New America Schools, which served non-English-speaking immigrants.
And Polis was never afraid to play the young hipster card, as he did in 2002 when he submitted an editorial to the Rocky Mountain News entitled "Eminem: Why I Cotton to Mathers."
In it, Polis argued that the controversial white rapper Eminem (née Marshall Mathers) was "one of the preeminent vocal artists of the day." Far from being antisocial, Polis said, Eminem should be held up as a paragon of virtue. "While Mathers's art is inspired by being your bogeyman, he is actually one of the most relevant forces today promoting fidelity, safe sex, and traditional family values to a generation typically chastised as apathetic and anchorless," he continued.
"In a time when our elected leaders can't seem to discuss these matters in a way that is at all relevant to young people," Polis went on, "Mathers's message, including the missive 'now I'm frustrated cause my d--- was unprotected ...' fills the void and speaks to teenagers in their own language."
Polis summed up his views by contrasting the frankness of Eminem's lyrics with what he considered the emptiness of contemporary political rhetoric. "We are lucky as a society to have someone of his talent and insight reaching such a mass audience with moral messages to fill a void that our so-called 'real' leaders refuse to address in a meaningful way. And, most important, his music rocks!"
In retrospect, Polis's public defense of Eminem was remarkable for a reason that wasn't obvious at the time. Even as Polis defended the rapper, gay and lesbian groups targeted Eminem's lyrics for promoting hatred against gays. Yet unbeknownst to Polis's readers or the general public whom he served in elected office, Polis himself was gay.
Four years later, he came out publicly in Boulder's Daily Camera, announcing that he had had a partner for the past two and a half years. "I think sexual orientation, like religion or race, has nothing to do with one's values, and to most people it's not important one way or the other," he told the paper.
* * *
It certainly wasn't important that day during Fantasy Camp, where Polis was focused on baseball, not politics. And truth be told, Polis is a pretty darn good ballplayer. "I'm telling you, he's got some skills," Rockies skipper Hurdle said. "He's a sleeper."
Polis and Owens met briefly in line waiting to shag fly balls where Rockies employee Chris "Snake" Rasnake was operating the ball machine providing the practice. The Owens-Polis handshake was more out of political necessity than genuine rapprochement, a meeting between the most successful politician in Colorado and the one who aspired to be.
Owens jogged to the outfield, camped out under a lazy fly ball, and confidently squeezed it into his mitt with two hands to the compliments of the coaches and those watching.
Polis was up next. He pulled down his sports goggles and sprinted out to the same green spot Owens had just occupied. He punched his hand into his glove and gave a thumbs-up that he was ready.
Rasnake tweaked the machine, smiled, and promptly sent a screaming line drive into the outfield that sent Polis running as the ball sailed over his head.
"That was a favor for [you]," Rasnake said to the governor as Polis scrambled to get the ball back into the infield.
"[You're] a good Republican, Snake," Owens called out. "All's fair in politics and baseball!"
The Boulder Democrat was also smiling when he returned to the line. The next time his turn came up, he pulled down the sports goggles and sprinted out to the spot in the outfield where the line drive had gone, punched his glove, and gave another thumbs-up.
When Snake tried to get him again by sending into the air the lazy fly ball he had given everybody else, Polis had to race in to catch it. But he caught it in full stride, earning admiration from the coaches.
"Nice adjustment, Polis," Hurdle said, and then he turned to Owens and the others. "He's a good player."
It wouldn't be the last time Jared Polis got the best of Colorado Republicans.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado by Adam Schrager, Rob Witwer. Copyright © 2010 Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Preface xxiii
Introduction
August 2008: The Democratic National Convention-How This Story Ends 1
Part 1 The Gang of Four
Chapter 1 Colorado's Political Past Meets the Future-in Arizona Jared Polis 13
Chapter 2 A Billionaire Decides to Spend Some Money Pat Stryker 25
Chapter 3 Political Nonprofits and the Architecture of Change Rutt Bridges 37
Chapter 4 "Somebody's Gotta Go" Tim Gill 47
Part 2 The Plan
Chapter 5 Bringing It All Together: The Roundtable Is Born 63
Chapter 6 Money, Technology, and Shoe Leather: The Roundtable Builds a Ground Game 78
Chapter 7 "We Didn't Have a Chance": The Roundtable Unleashes Hurricane-Force Winds of Change 90
Chapter 8 Circular Firing Squad: A Story of GOP Fratricide 104
Chapter 9 "Financial Atomic Bombs": The Roundtable Turns a Senate Race Inside Out 109
Part 3 Success
Chapter 10 Election 2004: A Great Night for the GOP-But Not in Colorado 119
Chapter 11 Taking It to the States Part One: Tim Gill Draws GOP Blood in Iowa 126
Chapter 12 Elevating the Game: The Roundtable Becomes CoDA 135
Chapter 13 The Trailhead Group: Colorado Republicans Fight Back-And Get Sued 146
Chapter 14 Election 2006: CoDA Extends Its Lead 157
Chapter 15 Taking It to the States Part Two: Wisconsin and Texas in the Crosshairs 167
Part 4 The Next Step
Chapter 16 The Democracy Alliance: The Colorado Model Goes National 177
Chapter 17 Election 2008: For CoDA, No More Worlds to Conquer 186
Chapter 18 The Aftermath: Money, Message, and a New Blueprint for Victory 198
Epilogue 207
Afterword In Their Own Words 209
Index 221
About the Authors 228