Larimer County’s delegation to the Colorado General Assembly at one time was considered the best in the state. Now it’s a mixed bag at best.
It still has Republican Sen. Steve Johnson and Democratic Sen. Bob Bacon, centrists who try to build coalitions and introduce legislation that has a realistic chance of getting passed.
But others, like Republican Reps. Jim Welker and Kevin Lundberg, are unapologetic and unaccommodating conservatives, quite a bit further to the right than their predecessors.
Not everyone would agree that Johnson and Bacon are better legislative models than Lundberg and Welker, or that the way to measure a good delegation is by its ability to get along with others, to compromise and to put new laws on the books.
These critics would say that go-along, get-along stuff only expands the role of government. They prefer legislators who want to slash government. They don’t have much patience with moderates, whom they consider mushy and insufficiently ideological.
But moderation and its inevitable accompaniments, effectiveness and accomplishment, built the sterling statehouse reputation of the old Larimer County delegation.
Starting sometime in the 1970s, it included such prominent politicians as Senate President Fred Anderson and House Speaker Ron Strahle. Jim Johnson, who went on to become a member of Congress, was part of it.
So was Steve Tool, the Republican chairman of the Joint Budget Committee. And so were Democrats Peggy Reeves and Stan Matsunaka, who served two years as Senate president in 2001-02.
The delegation has been mostly Republican. That’s the nature of Larimer County. But in the past the Larimer County delegation represented a more reasonable incarnation of Republicanism than some of its current members.
A group of Republican businessmen in Fort Collins is determined to restore the good old days. One of them is Bill Kaufman, a lawyer who was a legislator himself – and one of the Larimer lawmakers considered part of those “best” delegations.
The goal of the moderate Republican business community in Larimer County is to “get the party back to where it used to be,” Kaufman said.
They call themselves the Enterprise Group. It’s a small group, a dozen or two, but it has attracted philosophical and, more significantly, considerable financial support.
These are pragmatists, not ideologues. They supported last November’s Referendum C, as did a big majority of the business community around the state.
They’re unhappy with the tenor of the Republican primary for governor. Bob Beauprez and Marc Holtzman are fighting for the rightmost votes by saying Referendum C was a mistake, that voters were wrong to let state government spend the money it collects – with existing taxes, mind you, not a tax increase – on such fripperies as education and health care.
The business community had “gone to sleep,” Kaufman said, allowing the social-agenda Republicans to have their way. And now, “We have a very different party … . The party’s been hijacked …. These people are more anti-government.”
The Enterprise Group was looking for candidates to challenge Lundberg and Welker in Republican primary elections. “They don’t represent the mainstream of Larimer County,” Kaufman said.
But it hasn’t happened. And now it’s too late in the political season. But the effort to return to a more pragmatic, traditional Republicanism hasn’t gone away.
“Some of us are just done,” Kaufman said. “I’m done being called a RINO [Republican in Name Only]. I’m done being called a liberal.”
He and his Enterprise Group colleagues worry that appeals to their party’s basest anti-tax, anti-government sentiments, coupled with plummeting poll ratings for the president and Republican-controlled Congress, will lead to “annihilation for the party this fall.”
Republicans have lost touch with voters’ preference for rational government. Now, Kaufman said, there’s too much emphasis on “God, guns, gays and abortion … . That’s why the Democrats control the legislature.”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
