President Barack Obama has made a very public showing of his support for U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, but that endorsement has really ticked off some of the president’s own supporters.
They aren’t ready to turn their backs on Obama, but they do wish he’d butt out — although it’s probably already too late for that.
When Obama visited Denver on Feb. 18 for a couple of Bennet fundraisers, some of the picketers who greeted him were not the predictable Tea Party crowd. They were Democrats annoyed that national party officials are getting involved in a state primary race.
Those unhappy Democrats are supporters of Andrew Romanoff, who is running against Bennet for a seat many believe Romanoff, not Bennet, should have been appointed to. There is about to be a solid test of their comparative levels of support Tuesday night, when both parties hold their precinct caucuses.
Romanoff’s supporters think of themselves as “grass roots,” and that Bennet is the favorite of the elite party establishment. In a statement issued last week, two long-term party activists, Polly Baca and Ramona Martinez, called the big-footing from Washington “inappropriate and unacceptable.”
Baca and Ramirez, who have served a combined 38 years on the Democratic National Committee, also complained that their fiscal support of the party is now helping to fund a phone campaign on Bennet’s behalf. “Colorado Democrats have the knowledge and wisdom to think for ourselves and make our own decisions without someone who is not a Colorado voter telling us how to vote,” they said.
They quote several other similarly irked, mostly former, state party officials, such as former vice chair Julia Hicks, who said, “I want to know what the president will do if the person he supports doesn’t come out of our caucus, or better yet, gets on the ballot and loses the primary election.”
Baca, who is a former vice chair of the national committee and a former state legislator, said she is not disappointed in the president’s overall performance. “Obama inherited the worst economic challenges since the Great Depression,” she said in an e-mail. “I believe his policies saved our economy from going into a similar great depression.”
Nor is she concerned that he doesn’t seem to be listening to local Democrats. It’s very difficult, she said, because “The people who got him elected are not uniform in their point of view. I was thrilled with his appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor; however, I wish he would have pushed for a single-payer health care system.”
Baca has always been pretty liberal, but she’s also a pragmatist. She thinks the passion that put Obama in office — the fire in the belly of the base — is still there. “We just aren’t all passionate about the same issue.”
Among Latino voters, for example, support is split between Romanoff and Bennet. Romanoff is more popular with those who have been involved with the political process and understand the compromise that it sometimes requires. Baca said Bennet “is more popular with some pro-immigrant activists who are still upset about the 2006 legislative session,” when Romanoff was House speaker and laws were passed intended to fight illegal immigration.
She fully expects the Democrats to lose seats in this year’s congressional elections. “It’s impossible,” she said, for the president and his party to live up to the public’s expectations in the first two years. “It would help if some significant legislation was passed before the election.”
As for two years after that, Baca said, “for all those who helped elect Obama to be collectively passionate again about Obama, it will take another election with a Republican candidate who we dislike.”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com) is retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post.
