For once, the much-maligned Republican brass had it right. They thought Jane Norton — a conservative with an impressive resume that included statewide office — had the best chance to unseat Sen. Michael Bennet. But when they tried to boost Norton into the nomination, the GOP right wing balked.
The same grassroots geniuses who nominated Dan Maes for governor over an admittedly damaged Scott McInnis, and who then thought Tom Tancredo actually had a shot at beating John Hickenlooper in a three-way race, rejected Norton in the primary against the Weld County district attorney, Ken Buck.
The right refused to believe Norton was the genuine article — that she was a true conservative — given her association with John McCain in 2008.
And so they thrust Buck, a game but flawed candidate, onto center stage and thus ensured (although it wasn’t obvious at the time) that their party would lose both of the day’s biggest prizes.
The conservative surf was up, and the Colorado GOP couldn’t get its big boards off the beach.
Once again the party fielded candidates in the top statewide races who would prove to be less prepared than their Democratic opponents for a rough and tumble general campaign, who were more prone to gaffes and more susceptible of being portrayed as wild-eyed and extreme.
This was supposed to be a referendum on government spending, deficits, President Obama’s agenda, and a stagnant economy — and in most of the country it was. One Senate candidate — Michael Bennet — had his fingerprints all over that list of complaints, and the other didn’t. The one who didn’t should have won handily, as Norton very likely would have.
Instead, Bennet gave voters a host of reasons to wonder about Buck — and Buck himself clumsily added to the tally — with the result that the Republican’s unfavorable ratings soared.
Politics is a brutal business, and both Buck and Bennet, as well as their supporters, launched wave upon wave of nasty attacks. But you could have said the same about any tightly contested Colorado race in modern times.
What set the 2010 Senate campaign in a class by itself was the sheer variety of grave allegations directed at Buck. The negative barrage against Bennet was no less relentless but it was unremarkable in scope, for the most part an update of the “big-government liberal” mantra of old: Bennet was a spineless rubber stamp for Obama and a soul mate of Nancy Pelosi who “voted for record spending and national debt,” as well as higher taxes and bailouts.
The Democrats’ portrait of Buck, however, was altogether more sinister. He was a misogynist who “refused to prosecute a rape case, instead blaming the victim,” a Neanderthal who’d ban common forms of birth control, and a crackpot who “wants to end our right to vote for U.S. senators” and impose a 23 percent “national sales tax to everything you buy,” apparently for the heck of it.
And let’s not forget how he conspired to let rogue gun dealers off the hook, either.
Never mind that every one of these charges was wildly unfair — and the rape accusation simply grotesque. Buck had set himself up for many of them with thoughtless mistakes.
During the height of the onslaught on TV, it was sometimes hard to tell if Buck was a candidate for office or a fugitive from justice.
And that’s just to recount the weird stuff. As a Republican, he naturally was also accused of seeking to destroy Social Security, gut education spending and otherwise muck up the legacy of generations.
So in a year when Republicans should have been on a roll, Colorado voters stuck with a Washington big spender (Bennet’s pledges of moderation notwithstanding) and awarded the governor’s office to a Democrat for the eighth time in 10 contests spanning four decades.
Ah, but Republicans apparently did take one chamber of the legislature, right?
As if this were the year for a consolation prize.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
