FAWCETT SHUNS LABEL
Colorado Springs – The man of the hour at a recent fundraiser in a Colorado Springs home was Jay Fawcett, the Democrat running for the 5th Congressional District seat.
The invited guests were mostly Republicans and unaffiliated voters who asked questions about prescription drugs, health care and the war.
One guest asked Fawcett if he was a “liberal Democrat,” as his opponent’s campaign has labeled him based on, among other reasons, his abortion and health care stances.
A history buff who studies events such as the Peloponnesian War, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel delivered a short, studious answer.
President Teddy Roosevelt – a Republican, he explained – was the first to be labeled a progressive.
“I’m a progressive, just as Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive,” he said.
In one of Colorado’s and the nation’s reddest congressional districts, Faw cett has positioned himself as a moderate.
Pundits say he has the best chance of any Democrat to win the seat since the district was formed in 1972.
Fawcett’s rise from long shot to legitimate contender has drawn the attention of both parties at the national level. On Friday, the National Republican Congressional Committee put $141,160 into the 5th Congressional District race. And the Fawcett campaign said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had added them to its “Red to Blue” program for candidates it sees as having a good chance of winning.
In Colorado Springs, where 40 percent of the economy is defense-based, Fawcett has the kind of résumé that gets attention. He is a 1977 graduate of the Air Force Academy who won a Bronze Star for heroism in the first Gulf War. He now works for a contractor with the U.S. Northern Command at Peterson Air Force Base.
Fawcett, 50, has no political experience and no voting record to examine. He favors abortion rights and the withdrawal of troops from the center of Iraq to the borders. On immigration, he says he has no solution, but believes it is the responsibility of the federal government to protect the nation’s borders.
A lifelong Democrat, Fawcett grew up in Monongahela, Pa., a gritty blue- collar steel mill town where he and his family belonged to Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church. He was third in his high school class, an Eagle Scout, and good enough for the prestigious Air Force Academy. He arrived in 1973 to find what he viewed as a “problem- solving” community.
“I could not have told you the political focus of this town at that time.”
Same people, new perception
Fawcett, who returned to Colorado Springs in 2003, said the community is much more divided now, with social conservatives controlling much of the public debate.
He said the perception of Colorado Springs is based on “an extreme view of one end of one county that happens to be very vocal and happens to get a lot of national attention. I have yet to have someone try to save me in Starbucks. The people that made this a magic place when I came here in 1973, they’re still here. They just need to be reminded that they count, and just because some people are very noisy doesn’t mean they get to run everything.”
Fawcett said he has tried to accept all speaking invitations and has met with Focus on the Family, the New Life Church, and has attended Colorado Springs PrideFest, the annual parade for gays and lesbians.
Fawcett has been endorsed by a number of Democrats, including Sen. Ken Salazar, Sen. John Kerry and some military colleagues such as Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme allied commander; and Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha.
Mary Ellen McNally, who has served on the Colorado Springs City Council and District 11 school board, recorded an automated phone message encouraging Republicans to vote for Fawcett.
“I chose to support him because I believe he represents my views as a moderate Republican,” she said.
Challenging the establishment
At a recent campaign event, a man cited Fawcett’s previous calls for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign and asked whether the candidate was “unpatriotic.”
Again, Fawcett relied on history, telling the story of then-Sen. Harry Truman who, in 1941asked the president to form a commission on war profiteering. Truman’s charge proved true.
“When Jay is able to tell small stories like this to a crowd, they are able to draw solace from the fact that this has happened before. We were in a huge declared war … it is not wrong to say to any president, ‘Hey, what are you doing?”‘ said his wife, Susan O’Connell Fawcett.
Whenever the candidate gets the opportunity, he blasts the Bush administration for underfunding the Department of Veterans Affairs budget by $1 billion. He thinks the country should rethink how it treats stress in combat veterans.
When he is not making campaign appearances, Fawcett sits in a sterile room at campaign headquarters. Near his desk is a single photo on the wall – a picture of the U.S. Capitol.
On his desk, there is an inch-thick stack of papers with names and phone numbers of potential supporters. Faw cett spends hours a day calling up to 100 people a day, asking for their vote.
“This is Jay Fawcett,” he says. “As you know, Congressman Hefley is retiring …”
LAMBORN TOUTS TIES
Colorado Springs – In more than a decade in the state legislature, Doug Lamborn said, he voted on more than 5,000 bills.
“I have a voting record,” he said. “I have clear and consistent positions on all the issues.”
But Lamborn, the Republican candidate for the 5th Congressional District, has been notably absent from the hustings in this conservative six-county district, declining invitations to appear before veterans, elderly and minority groups.
Still, Lamborn bristles when he’s accused of being a stealth candidate by the Jay Fawcett campaign.
What’s stealthy, Lamborn said, are his opponent’s stances on several high-profile issues.
“He won’t say whether or not he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. He refused to come up with a plan for immigration,” Lamborn said. “He just talks about vague principles, like ‘it has to be humane’ before he’ll go along with it.”
Just nine days before Nov. 7, Lam born is looking for the same magic that put him over the top in a contentious six-man GOP primary – early voters.
More than 60,000 people in El Paso County have requested ballots by mail, and the Lamborn campaign has sent “tens of thousands” of mailers to voters with ballots in their hands. Volunteers are backing up the mail with personal phone calls.
“We’re trying to tell Doug’s story about his record in the legislature and show that his values are in step with the district,” said Jon Hotaling, campaign manager for Lamborn.
Lamborn, 52, is anti-abortion, opposed to gay marriage and has promised to oppose any tax increases.
“I’m going to vote for and promote the same Republican values that I’ve been working for 12 years in the state legislature,” he said. “I support the Ronald Reagan agenda of smaller government, lower taxes and a strong military.”
Campaign under fire
Born in Leavenworth, Kan., Lamborn said he grew up with “traditional Midwestern values” – church on Sunday, family dinners at night and a belief in hard work and self-reliance. He graduated valedictorian at Lansing High School in Kansas and was a National Merit Scholar. He earned a journalism degree and a law degree from the University of Kansas and moved to Colorado Springs in 1988.
Lamborn came under fire during the primary, after advertisements from the Christian Coalition suggested Jeff Crank, his nearest competitor, supported the “radical homosexual lobby.”
Rep. Joel Hefley, who is retiring from the seat after 20 years and supported Crank, called Lamborn’s campaign “sleazy” and “dishonest.”
Lamborn has not denounced the ads, saying they were the work of groups unaffiliated with his campaign.
“It’s disappointing,” he said. “(Hefley)was blaming me for outside groups and you can’t control outside groups under the law. There were individual candidates running distorted ads, including his handpicked successor, who was running negative and distorted ads against me, but Mr. Hefley doesn’t denounce that.”
Hefley’s pronouncement explains, in part, why the GOP nominee in a district where Republicans have a 2-to-1 registration advantage over Democrats finds himself in a fight.
And it was not the first time Lam born had been accused of nasty politics.
In May 1998, Lamborn ran against Tom Ratterree for the state Senate. Ratterree claimed in a story printed in The (Colorado Springs) Gazette that he had received copies of a letter circulated by Lamborn supporters suggesting Ratterree, who opposed euthanasia, took his wife off of life support.
His wife died of cancer in 1991 and had requested that she not be connected to life-support machinery.
Ratterree dropped out of the race, telling a Gazette reporter: “… the lack of Christian attitude by some people in the community, I don’t need that.”
Ratterree died in 2005.
Lamborn said there never was such a letter: “That would be a very mean thing to say.”
Conservative clout
In the statehouse, Lamborn was seen as a champion of conservative values.
He was the Senate sponsor of the biggest tax cut in Colorado history, lowering the state income tax in 1999 by $1 billion over five years. He sponsored a bill that requires felons in Colorado to submit to a DNA test, and helped restructure the state’s College Invest program when it was foundering.
He said failing four times to pass legislation restricting late-term abortions was his biggest disappointment.
“Forty states have some restriction on late-term abortions, but we do not,” he said.
Lamborn has endorsements from Gov. Bill Owens, Sen. Wayne Allard, more than two dozen U.S. congressmen and more than two dozen state legislators.
In September, he received a letter from Dennis Hastert that suggests the speaker of the House will help Lam born get appointed to the important House Armed Services Committee if Republicans maintain control.
The Fawcett campaign has challenged his credentials on military affairs and told Lamborn that he should sever ties with Hastert, who has been pressured to step down from his speaker position in the fallout over former Rep. Mark Foley’s e-mail communications with pages.
But that’s not enough to deter Chuck Broerman, a former head of the El Paso County Republican Party.
“Doug Lamborn has consistently been a vote for conservatives,” Broerman said. “He has a voting pattern that shows that he supports people, whether they are social conservatives or fiscal conservatives, and he shares my values.”
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
The 5th District
Established: 1972
Voter registration (as of Oct. 1)
COUNTY REP DEM UNAFF OTHER TOTAL
El Paso 162,797 73,365 112,385 1,091 349,638
Fremont 11,985 6,677 7,532 103 26,297
Teller 8,329 3,198 5,285 82 16,894
Chaffee 5,230 3,286 3,779 46 12,341
Park 2,607 1,361 2,227 55 6,250
Lake 1,056 2,135 1,579 44 4,814
Total 192,004 90,022 132,787 1,421 416,234
The candidates
DOUG LAMBORN
Party affiliation: Republican
Website: www.lambornforcongress.com
Last degree earned: Juris Doctorate, University of Kansas
Occupation: State senator, attorney
Family: Wife, Jeanie; five children.
JAY FAWCETT
Party affiliation: Democrat
Website: www.fawcett4congress.com
Last degree earned: MBA, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, 1985
Occupation: Retired Air Force officer, defense contractor, small-business owner
Family: Wife, Susan O’Connell Fawcett; two children
