Which is more obnoxious: Tom Tancredo claiming President Obama said “white” people cling to their guns and Bibles, when Obama didn’t; or Mayor John Hickenlooper, while explaining why the Matthew Shepard Foundation chose to locate in Denver, claiming, “Colorado and Wyoming are very similar. We have some of the same, you know, backwards thinking in the kind of rural Western areas you see in . . . Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico”?
I’d give each candidate for governor a perfect 10 on the Outrage Index, with a slight edge possibly going to Hickenlooper.
In saying residents of small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest cling to “guns or religion” during his presidential campaign, Obama clearly was referring for the most part to whites, although he wasn’t so crude to say so. So it’s understandable that Tancredo could misremember the quotation.
What’s not understandable is his casual recklessness — his stated willingness to “just take the most inflammatory [version of the quotation] I can think of and accept that it’s true,” and never mind if it injects a racial component that the president never intended.
Hickenlooper’s gaffe, which surfaced recently even though it occurred late last year, is different. Matthew Shepard was murdered in a 1998 hate crime of breathtaking viciousness. It transfixed the nation in part because it was so distinctive.
Residents of the rural West may well be more socially conservative than the mayor’s urban neighbors, but to confuse their social views with a propensity for murderous violence is simply beyond the pale. And yet that is what the mayor did by referring to “some of the same . . . backwards thinking” in the context of the Shepard tragedy.
Unlike Tancredo, Hickenlooper wasn’t intending to be outrageous. But he was tripped up by a patronizing attitude toward those who may not share the cultural outlook found more typically in larger cities.
Speaking of worrisome statements by Hickenlooper (we could return to Tancredo, admittedly, but The Post’s Mike Littwin seems to have that beat fairly well covered, wouldn’t you say?), what are we to make of the mayor’s suggestion that the state cap its population?
We “can handle more population,” he told The Post’s Bruce Finley, but then added, “I do think there’s a limit. We’re at the point where, while we may not be at that limit, we need to come to terms with it, discuss it as a statewide community and begin to define what that limit looks like.”
Really? How could “we” possibly reach consensus on a prudent limit to our population? And how could it be enforced? Urban growth boundaries historically haven’t stopped population growth, although they can boost land prices and densities and jack up the price of housing, further pressuring the working poor and middle class.
Even if every community in Colorado could be persuaded to adopt a growth boundary, many would surely leave enough space for future development to undermine even a flexible population goal.
As it should be undermined. So long as this nation’s population continues to grow — and the Census Bureau projects an increase of more than 100 million by mid-century — it’s irresponsible for any state or region to talk about pulling up the drawbridge.
Incidentally, the biggest driver of that growth is immigration, a topic on which Hickenlooper has not exactly been outspoken.
Like the mayor, I don’t want to see the state overrun by new residents (holy I-70!). It’s just that I don’t have any idea what that means in actual numbers. Germany accommodates more than 80 million people in an area slightly smaller than Montana. Now that’s dense. On the other hand, a population of even 5 million might have seemed intolerable at one time to many Coloradans.
Better to concentrate on sound community planning and preserving an adequate supply of open space than worry about a possible limit to our numbers. It’s the quality of life that matters, not how many fellow Coloradans share in it.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
