Sen. Chris Romer went home last Wednesday with a raging headache, and it had nothing to do with the medical marijuana mess he’s entangled himself in.
No, this headache came courtesy, he thinks, of watching another political family laid bare in front of the media glare, of watching another political family come close to cracking under the pressure that so often seeps into public service.
“Individual politicians get elected, but the families serve together,” said Romer, the son of former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer. “It’s the families that have to deal with the contact sport of politics.”
Gov. Bill Ritter’s decision to not seek re-election so he could focus on his family was admirable.
We’ve seen the strain the job places on other families. Gov. Bill Owens and his wife separated during his second term and later divorced. Gov. Romer held a press conference to confess to a relationship with an aide.
Those things may have happened regardless of either man being governor, but being in the spotlight only exacerbates an already stressful family situation.
Ritter’s decision was consistent with how he’s made other political decisions: with his gut and heart, not his head. It’s been hard over the past three years to watch him step needlessly on land mines he planted himself through political miscalculations. But this time, his heart was right.
Sen. Romer says there are days when he wonders if the costs of public service — the long hours, the stress, the vitriol — outweigh the benefits.
He remembers sitting up from 2 to 6 a.m., waiting to hear the thud of The Denver Post the morning he knew the headline news would be about his father’s relationship.
“We were living moment by moment,” he said.
Romer is quick to point out that he’s not drawing a corollary between his father’s situation and Ritter’s family situation, but it shows the pressure brought to bear on the rest of the family when a loved one is in the public eye.
Being governor is like being a CEO of a Fortune 500 company — but without the salary. There’s tremendous pressure to perform and produce. People are counting on you to make the right call, and everyone has a different idea about what that might be.
The job is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While you’re eating rubber chicken dinners in small towns, your family is home trying to get by without you.
And these days, with blogs and 24-hour news, the prying eyes can be unrelenting.
Surely those who want to be governor know that. But Ritter’s years as a district attorney didn’t adequately prepare him, or his family, for those pressures. And when they moved in to the governor’s mansion, they lost the security blanket of their neighborhood.
“We knew all of our neighbors. They knew us. We could go in and out of everybody’s houses,” Ritter told The Post’s Lynn Bartels. “That altered dramatically when we got to the governor’s residence. I think that has been particularly hard on my kids.”
You might recall that the Owens family moved out of the mansion and back home because it was better for their kids.
I’ll never forget chatting with Ritter at a party last year when he introduced me to his wife, Jeannie. She smiled as she shook my hand.
“He’s the editorial page editor at The Post,” the governor said, grinning and waiting for her reaction. Her smile dropped faster than her husband’s approval ratings.
I chuckled, nervously, knowing I had made way too many cracks like that in the past, and said sheepishly: “Sorry.”
“It’s OK,” she said, smiling again as she told me a wise person had advised her not to read the newspaper. It wasn’t good for her health.
We all chuckled this time. But the burden that comes with the honor of being the first family was apparent. And I was reminded, again, that life inside the gated governor’s mansion isn’t as glamorous as it looks, especially for the supporting cast.
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
