If there’s anything we’ve learned from the Bennet-Romanoff Senate primary, it’s that Democrats are angry too.
If you’ve watched the latest Andrew Romanoff campaign ad, you see Romanoff is angry, indignant and stern. His eyes, often in mid-wink, flash with foreboding. This guy is seriously miffed.
If you know Romanoff, you know that in normal times, he rarely goes more than two sentences without cracking a joke. But these are not normal, or funny, times. Like too many people in Denver, Romanoff has lost his home. Unlike most, though, Romanoff had to sell his house to finance TV campaign ads.
I can see the director, when trying to get Romanoff in the mood, telling him to find his inner homeless self: “That rich guy Michael Bennet stole your house, dude.”
Romanoff is currently angry because, according to a New York Times front-page story, Bennet made “exotic deals” with Wall Street banks when he was DPS superintendent, deals that have allegedly cost the district millions.
Bennet, who made millions working deals for Phil Anschutz, says the deals were not “exotic,” that The New York Times “got the story wrong” and that DPS “would have had to make $17 million in cuts” this year if the deal for pension certificates — which the school board passed unanimously — hadn’t been made.
My default position when it’s New York Times vs. any politician is to go with The Times, particularly if the politician once worked for Anschutz. But I did notice that The Times failed to mention that the Denver school board has become a proxy battlefield for the Bennet-Romanoff wars or that school board member Jeannie Kaplan, a major source for the story, is a major Romanoff supporter.
And when I re-read the Denver Post editorial from 2007 warning that this very public deal, while necessary, could also be risky, I couldn’t remember Romanoff — then the House speaker who represented a Denver district — sounding any warnings about big banks or Wall Street or the dangers of Bennet gambling away our children’s future.
Of course, unless I missed it, he wasn’t crusading against PAC money then, either.
That was then. This is now. And now Romanoff sternly intones in his ad about Bennet and the DPS deal: “I approve this message because you and I are going to shut down their casino.”
All that was missing was a Bennet look alike in a green eyeshade dealing cards with an extra ace or two inexpertly hidden in his shoe. Of course, that would have been funny, and we’ve moved beyond funny.
In trying to get through the financial morass, I consulted my financial deep-throat guy who unhelpfully told me both sides have a point. The deal was a disaster at the start, he said, but looks as if it would be a good deal from here on. The more he talked, the more I understood — making or losing money is in the eye of the guy who writes the spreadsheet — and then he inevitably got into auction-rate securities, at which point I said I’d get back to him.
Before I hung up, though, he did point out that there was a major issue ignored by The Times. DPS desperately wanted to merge its pension plan with PERA. A merger would allow teachers to move jobs and pension plans across districts. The only way to make a merger happen was for DPS to borrow to shore up its pension plan. The only way to do that, Bennet says, was to make a deal like the one the school board made.
But the details aren’t the issue here. It’s about a well-earned mistrust of people in power and the money that helps get them there. Bennet, a son of privilege who was appointed to the job, has made for an easy target. I hear all the time that Bennet got the Senate job, and all his jobs, through connections, as if Anschutz were planting Bennet from job to job — you know, just to make that exotic DPS deal possible.
Romanoff, who hoped to get the Senate job himself through his connections, is, as he says, an imperfect messenger, one who has spent nearly his entire adult life in politics, a Yale grad whose father is a judge, the kind of lefty who, when in the statehouse, voted for a pro-Iraq war resolution and bragged about ugly legislation that came out of the special session on illegal immigrants.
It’s easy enough to judge Bennet’s brief Senate tenure. He has been a reliable vote for the Obama agenda and has voted almost identically to Mark Udall. I’m guessing if Romanoff had been senator, his voting record would be nearly indistinguishable.
There’s the interesting question out there about why Obama has gotten so little credit — even among Democrats — for landmark legislation like health care reform or financial reform. The answer requires a longer story about the state of media, about the 24-hour news cycle, about the cynicism that has taken hold in America. But politicians these days must be anti-Washington.
Bennet tried tapping into the Washington-is-broken theme. You remember his Washington County vs. Washington, D.C., TV ad. The problem was, no one believed that Bennet had spent quality time anywhere near Colorado’s Washington.
The problem for Bennet is that when he knocks Washington, D.C., he’s offering up up some amorphous target.
When Romanoff knocks Washington, D.C., his target is the guy who’s already there, even if he has just arrived.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
