If you go by definitions, Colorado is the original Red State. If you go by history, you’d know that it was admitted to the Union in 1876 because the Republicans figured they’d need its three electoral votes that year — and they were right.
So when some of our GOP luminaries felt a need to gather in a non-smoke-filled room in February to plot a return to power, I found it easier to give credence to all those recent stories about the coming death of the Republican Party.
After all, if they’re in trouble in Colorado — where just a few years ago they had both U.S. Senate seats, five of the seven congressional seats, the governorship and all but one other statewide office, both houses of the legislature, and three straight presidential elections — then they’re in trouble everywhere.
It’s not hard to see why. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose various of President Barack Obama’s actions and proposals, ranging from cost to unintended consequences.
But it was mustard that recently got the voices of the GOP riled up. On May 4, the president and vice president lunched at a burger joint, and Obama ordered mustard on his burger. “What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup but Dijon mustard?,” Laura Ingraham asked on the radio, and Sean Hannity smirked that “I hope you enjoyed that fancy burger, Mr. President!”
Now, I can see being concerned about the president’s diet if we read something like this: “The president was unable to attend the emergency meeting of the National Security Council yesterday afternoon because his lunch included a hot dog topped with a dozen Peruvian ‘gringo killer’ chiles, reputed to be the hottest in the world.”
But mustard on a burger? What’s next, an attack on French fries as un-American? Oh, wait, they already did that. Perhaps we’ll see an analysis of White House pizza toppings and their rank, from anchovies to zucchini, on the Fox Food Elitism Scale, devised by Regular Guys who slather ketchup on cooked-to-charcoal burgers.
A few weeks before the Mustard Incident, Obama went to the Summit of the Americas and shook hands with another head of state, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. It looked like normal good manners to me, since Dwight Eisenhower shook hands with Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon with Mao Tse-Tung, and Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev. We expect our leaders to be civil, even with those who are not our friends.
But to Newt Gingrich, the handshake “sends a terrible signal to all of Latin America, and a terrible signal about how the new administration regards dictators.”
I suspect that Gingrich would also have found fault if Obama had spurned Chavez or flipped him off. It would have “diminished the dignity of the office” or the like. A handshake is as minuscule a matter as mustard.
Back to Colorado: One of our leading Republicans is Josh Penry of Grand Junction, minority leader in the state Senate. Well before new drilling regulations took effect, Penry pointed to a decline in natural-gas activity on the Western Slope, and whined that “These rules have made a grim situation almost intolerable for these companies. This is killing jobs.”
But the truth is that natural-gas prices have dropped, and drilling has declined in other states, too. In other words, The Market has spoken, and it was my impression that Republicans respected The Market.
Penry might make an honest case for expanding pipeline capacity, but true to current GOP form, he goes for the petty and irrelevant — blaming regulations that weren’t even in effect.
Little wonder the Republican Party is reeling these days, both here and nationally. It can’t tell a mountain from a molehill.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) of Salida is a freelance writer and history buff, and a frequent contributor to The Post.
