For a decade, I had Scott McInnis as my representative in the Congress of the United States, but I never learned how he got the nickname of “Scooter.”
But I suspect we’ll find out this year whether he deserves it, because he’s going to have to do a lot of scooting to have a shot at defeating Bill Ritter for governor.
The dilemma is the same for both Republicans and Democrats. General elections are won at the center, but nominations are dominated by the edges. That’s because party activists turn out for caucuses, county assemblies, state conventions and primary elections. Democratic activists tend to be more liberal than Democrats in general, and GOP activists tend to foam more at the mouth than the few remaining normal Main Street Republicans.
So to get the nomination, a modern Republican needs to pass various ideological purity tests, such as proclaiming his pro-life credentials while insinuating that people who can’t afford health insurance might as well just die. Or leading chants of “Drill, baby, drill” even when the topic is oil shale, which is not produced by drilling.
For a few while, I thought McInnis had avoided this problem after various GOP financiers and heavyweights paid a visit to his main challenger for the nomination, Josh Penry, a state senator from Grand Junction and a former staffer for McInnis. They persuaded Penry to drop out while uniting the party honchos on a “Platform for Prosperity.”
Thus McInnis would have the nomination without having to promise state subsidies for the poor, beleaguered gas-drilling industry, or declaring it a financial necessary to close every public college and university except Mesa State. McInnis could just find that elusive line item in the state budget for “waste, fraud and abuse,” and propose to eliminate those expenditures.
However, there is still another announced Republican candidate, Evergreen businessman Don Maes. On Dec. 12, he appeared at a “Defend the Republic” rally of Tea Party types on the state Capitol steps, telling them, “It’s time to find a candidate you believe in.”
If he is the candidate that enough right-thinking activists believe in, then there could be a Republican primary, and that campaign could push McInnis into hard-line positions that won’t help him in the general election.
McInnis has tried to get ahead of this by appearing on Fox News with a graphic that said, “Tea Party Backed Candidate Leading in CO Governor’s Race,” and he did not argue when host Neil Cavuto described him as “the country’s biggest Tea Party candidate.”
There are two problems with this. One is that the more “Tea Party backing” he appears to have, the less likely he is to be “leading in Colorado governor’s race.”
The other is that one Tea Party organization in northern Colorado refers to McInnis on its website as “an unprincipled party hack that has been shoved down our throats.” Another explains that “When it comes to Scott McInnis, here is the truth: Scott has declined or not responded to every invitation to Tea Party or 912 meetings, rallies, and forums. . . . It’s one thing for McInnis to run lock step with his party, that’s his choice, but to actually mislead the media and the public to believe he has the support of We The People is nothing short of dishonest. We are being played like pawns. And we can’t put up with it.”
That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement from the 9-12 Tea Party types. And even if McInnis avoids a primary, he’s got to worry about a third-party spoiler — either an independent Tea Party candidate or a Libertarian with Tea Party support.
McInnis will have to scoot over to the Tea Party to defuse that challenge, meanwhile scooting the other way to attract centrist votes away from Ritter. It will be something like Michael Jackson’s moonwalk — moving one way while appearing to travel in the other direction — and it might be almost as entertaining.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a freelance writer and history buff, and a frequent contributor to The Post.
