In this election year, we have heard about candidates playing the “race card” and the “gender card.” Then there’s the “geography card.”
The geography card has been played in national campaigns, as with the dire warnings from Republicans in 2006 that if Democrats gained control of the U.S. House, then Nancy Pelosi would become speaker of the House and impose her “San Francisco values” on the American heartland.
If only. She has served as speaker for more than a year, and I’ve yet to see any of those San Francisco values like high wages, climbing real-estate prices and excellent public transportation. Why can’t the Republicans keep their promises?
In Colorado, the geography card has come into play with the Republican effort to tag Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall as a “Boulder liberal.” Udall resides in nearby Eldorado Springs, which is in Boulder County. The right-thinkers cite this from the Longmont Times-Call: “Said Udall, who lives in Eldorado Springs: ‘It’s wonderful to be home.’ He said Boulder County is ‘home base for me. This is the touchstone; this is where I take my inspiration.’ ”
However, in the article, Udall refers to “Boulder County,” not “Boulder.” For all this tells us, he gets his inspiration from the cornfields east of Longmont and finds his touchstones at the quarries above Lyons. The city of Boulder does have a reputation. Where else would someone get fined $1,000 for making a poodle’s hair pink? Generally this gets spun as “over-zealous politically correct protection of companion animals from essentially harmless activities that dingbat liberals insist on criminalizing,” but this could also be portrayed as “Boulder is a bastion of law and order where all offenses are taken seriously.”
Boulder isn’t the only designated liberal bastion. During the 2006 state Senate campaign in my district, there were some Republican mutterings that Democrat Gail Schwartz was an “Aspen liberal,” though she lives in nearby Snowmass. Aspen, like Boulder, has a reputation.
But are those reputations deserved? Using the 2004 presidential election results as a guide, Boulder County is quite Democratic: John Kerry got 66.3 percent of the vote. Pitkin County, home of Aspen, gave Kerry 68.4 percent. But the most liberal county by this measure was San Miguel (its seat is Telluride) at 71.6 percent. Denver, at 69.6 percent, was also more “liberal” than Boulder or Aspen.
The question arises: Are there conservative counterparts? Certainly there are parts of our state that regularly trend rightward. But something like “Colorado Springs conservative” does not trip off the tongue the way “Boulder liberal” does. Besides, Colorado Springs just came up with $53 million to bribe the U.S. Olympic Committee into staying in town for 25 more years. True conservatives would argue that if the city has money to spend on such subsidies, then taxes are too high and should be lowered.
As for other conservative strongholds, you never hear of “Springfield wingnuts,” “Fort Morgan red-staters,” or “Meeker rightists.” Nobody ever campaigns, at least statewide, on “Julesberg principles” or “Montrose morality.”
With the geography card coming into play, why limit the deck to just Boulder and Aspen, when we have a big, diverse state that ranges from Gardner Communard Values to Cowdrey Second Amendment Defenders? After all, it would be a refreshing change if Colorado politics were played with a full deck.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida.
