This time, John Hickenlooper doesn’t get to play the flirt. This time, he doesn’t get to play cute.
He doesn’t have the option of playing the Park Hill Hamlet like he did four years ago — waiting approximately forever before finally deciding not to run for governor, even as Bill Ritter fumed in silence.
When Hickenlooper says now that he and his family need time to decide whether a gubernatorial run is right for them, I’m wondering if he thinks we’ve forgotten that a year ago, he was very publicly volunteering himself as a candidate to replace Ken Salazar as U.S. senator.
I haven’t done the math, but being senator has to be many times harder on your family than being a governor. Certainly, if nothing else, the commute is tougher.
And being a big-city mayor is a fairly demanding job in and of itself. The biggest change for Hickenlooper — besides having to deal with the legislature and taking a few more trips than anticipated to, say, Montrose — is that he’d have to cross the street to get from city hall to the Capitol.
Obviously, Hickenlooper likes to be wooed. And in Hickenlooper’s still-brief political career, he has spent a lot of time listening to people whisper in his ear. He was not simply a fresh face with a fresh shtick. He also was that rarest commodity — a Denver mayor who seemed to have appeal beyond the city limits.
And every time someone asked whether Hickenlooper might consider a bigger job, Hickenlooper was ready to listen.
But times, and stakes, have changed — for Hickenlooper and the Democratic Party. Hickenlooper has to either step up, as nearly everyone is predicting he will, or risk angering every Democrat in the state who is not named Andrew Romanoff, Cary Kennedy or Ed Perlmutter.
That wasn’t always the case. Once, he was only an intriguing option for a party out of power. Now Hickenlooper is the best remaining option for a party in power but one suddenly under siege.
If Hickenlooper can’t pull the trigger this time, my guess is no one in Colorado Democratic politics is going to want to hear from him again — not unless he’s personally fixing the pothole on his/her street.
You know the situation. Bill Ritter dropped his bombshell. Democrats were stunned but not necessarily saddened. Ritter was vulnerable, as rival Scott McInnis had been saying all along. And even as Republicans were crowing about Ritter’s departure and saying the Democrats were stuck with the junior varsity, they worried that sixth man Ken Salazar would be the first guy off the bench.
It’s no secret Salazar has long wanted the governor’s job. And as soon as the news leaked about Ritter, the Salazar bandwagon began loading up. Hickenlooper said he’d be the first to volunteer for him (the Democrats, you may note, are in full no- more-primaries-please mode).
Still, Salazar, who would have begun the race as the clear favorite, turned down the chance. This is not as surprising as you’d think.
For Salazar, well-known for his caution, the timing was all wrong. He had just moved to the Interior Department. It’s a big job, one he really enjoys, one that’s at the center of debate. He’s a prominent national figure who, at this stage, has any number of career options. If he had entered the governor’s race, he would have looked like a guy who can’t decide what job he wants. Salazar knows what he wants. And he knew that Colorado Democrats wanted him to rescue the party.
But he must have thought he didn’t have to — because Hickenlooper was there waiting for the chance. And Salazar was as quick to endorse Hickenlooper as Hickenlooper had been to endorse him.
Is there any more to this story? The narrative works. The logic works. Even the polls work well enough. And yet, veteran Hickenlooper watchers aren’t sure what he’ll do.
Certainly, Hickenlooper understands the timing issue. When he considered running four years ago for governor, he had been mayor for just over two years. Democrats were struggling to find someone to run against Bob Beauprez, who was then considered a formidable opponent.
For Hickenlooper, a run would have gone counter to his image as a non-politician politician. He’d have looked instead like a grasping-politician politician. You know, like the rest of them.
But the longer the decision took, the more he seemed either indecisive or, worse, a tease.
Now the timing couldn’t be better for Hickenlooper — except, of course, for the fact that all Democrats shudder every time you say “2010.” Oh, and that Denver mayors rarely become Colorado governors.
Hickenlooper has done the mayor thing and is ready, you’d think, to move on. Maybe he hasn’t exactly solved homelessness, but his city did survive the national Democratic convention — as well as another Broncos collapse — with its image more or less intact.
But it’s Hickenlooper’s image — will he or won’t he? — that is up for debate. What worries Democrats is that the debate might never end.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
