All the GOP leaders love Christmas a lot. But the partisan landscape this year was a SHOCK.
Colorado, it seems, isn’t red anymore. The voters abandoned Repubs by the score.
The guv’ner, the Senate, the Assembly all went to the Democrat column. A message was sent.
I’ll be darned if I know what it was, I admit. But old party assumptions, they took a real hit.
Republican notions – the thinking that said, “Our control is forever. We’re perm’nently red” – were wrong in November. The voters rebelled. They rejected Mark Hillman and Rick O’Donnell.
What hit folks the hardest and caused real dismay was the shot that was taken by Rep. Bob Beauprez. People thought he was certain to win the guv job, till the jibes starting coming ’bout old “Both Ways Bob.”
The shellacking he got was a shocker, a jolt, from red voters who acted in open revolt. Some stopped being R’s and they stubbornly went to register newly as independent.
They voted for Suthers and Coffman, it’s true. But red counties like Douglas, they leaned pretty blue.
Even Trailhead, the fund that the governor led, couldn’t stop the tsunami and keep the state red.
Across the whole country in last month’s election a movement began in a whole new direction. The voters in droves voted D, D, D, D, leaving R’s on the ballot to cry, “Woe is me!”
The Congress went blue, both the House and the Senate. Blue guvs were elected in most states, and then it was clear that the country was in for a change. The reasons? Oh boy, they sure crossed a wide range.
The voters were angry. Their patience was spent. Their wages were stagnant. They started to vent. “Our gas is too pricey,” they said. They were mad.
“Relations are icy from Yemen to Chad. Enough of the spying, Gitmo and the lying. We’ve had it with Rumsfeld, with young soldiers dying.”
They said that the country was on the wrong track.
The real Grinch of ’06? The war in Iraq.
The Democrats cheered and they stoked the reds’ fear that the country’d get bluer with each passing year. Who knows if it’s true? Who knows what to expect?
Giddy Dems went to work on the New West Project.
They plan to address things like water, like oil, like the beautiful landscape that no one should spoil. They hope to make laws now and not just big boasts. They hope to be strong here, not just on the coasts. They hope to make progress in state after state. They want a big victory in 2008.
But haunting them, taunting them, holding them back is that Grinch of all Grinches, the war in Iraq. ‘Cause while fighting goes on, there’s no money to spend and we’ll all feel uneasy until there’s an end.
So the D’s and the R’s, the blues and the reds, must find common ground and must work with their heads. They must leave petty diff’rences all in the past, and bring home the troops and do it real fast.
There is no time to waste, no excuse for gridlock. The U.S. must clean up its mess in Iraq.
So regardless of whether the Dems want to hear it, success for them rests on magnanimous spirit. They can’t do it alone. They can’t play politics. They must reach ‘cross the aisle and reject the old tricks.
They must look to our allies and mend all our fences, seek help from our friends and abandon pretenses, commit to start talks between Muslims and Jews, and end all the hatred.
There’s too much to lose.
‘Cause deep in the hearts of the Arabs, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the reds and the blues our hopes are the same from the moment of birth:
Good health, happy families.
And real peace on Earth.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
