John Hickenlooper was out there fooling ’em again.
I mean that in a good way. I was thinking this after watching Hickenlooper’s first State of the State address and seeing Republican legislators jump to their feet to applaud the Democratic governor.
Governors always talk about bipartisanship, but like the old line about the weather, they rarely do anything about it.
I’ve seen more State of the State addresses than I care to remember, and in each one of them the governor makes a call for the parties to work together. Legislators from both sides always applaud. Unenthusiastically. Cynically. Insincerely. Eye-rollingly.
But this was vintage Hickenlooper, who had everyone going. Hickenlooper is a social liberal who thinks that taxes aren’t evil. But he’s also a pragmatic businessman who thinks like a pragmatic businessman.
I was talking recently with Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty about Hickenlooper. I won’t say McNulty — a self-avowed partisan — was in thrall to Hickenlooper, but when he finished talking, I had to ask him, “Did you vote for the guy or what?”
McNulty laughed. But, just for the record, he didn’t say he didn’t.
The funny thing about the Hickenlooper era, all five days of it, is that the timing — coming, as it does, toward the tail end of a disastrous recession — could not be better for this new governor.
When you’re a governor with no money to spend, what you have left to sell is good government, efficient government, competent government, government that works, pragmatic, bipartisan government.
Hickenlooper not only believes in good government. He believes even more in saying how much he believes in good government, which is at least half the battle. Because, face it, who really knows how efficiently any government is run?
Hickenlooper cares about good government so much that he refers to it almost as often as he does the kitchen table, a reference which I’m hoping he soon retires. For those of us who don’t have a kitchen table — I’ve got more like a kitchen island myself — I’m starting to worry if we’ll all be included in this new kitchen-table-centric Colorado.
History tells us it’s not easy to sell yourself as legitimately bipartisan even if, like Hickenlooper, you have tried mightily to never have a D placed anywhere near your name.
You rarely hear him say he’s a Democrat. The last time I heard him mention the word was at the Democratic National Convention, when he didn’t really have any choice.
He was able to run for mayor in nonpartisans elections. He was able to run for governor against a Republican who wasn’t there and an American Constitution Party candidate who wasn’t all there.
Much has been made of Hickenlooper’s promise not to run negative ads in his race for governor, a promise he kept. He got a break, in that he was never seriously challenged. But as he told me the other day, you can’t really run attack ads in a campaign and then seriously lay any claim to bipartisanship.
“If I had run attack ads, those Republicans probably wouldn’t have been standing,” he said.
Barack Obama tried to sell himself as a postpartisan president and has largely failed. He failed, in part, because Democrats were given a spectacular opportunity to exploit their large majorities in Congress — and to have passed that up would have been, as the kids say, an epic fail.
He also has struggled because even though he’s a good communicator, he gas found himself competing directly with professional communicators in the media ready to challenge him at every turn.
Hickenlooper doesn’t face these same challenges. The Democrats in the legislature were never clear on how to read Bill Ritter and want to give Hickenlooper a break. And Republicans found Ritter — a far better man than politician — almost too easy to demonize and are worried about Hickenlooper, who’s out there appointing Republicans to key positions. I think it’s called co-opting.
Hickenlooper likes to come off as quirky for public consumption, but he’s a tough administrator who will be difficult for either side to roll. If you can make that work, you end up being compared to Ronald Reagan.
When I asked Hickenlooper which politician he saw as a role model for bipartisanship, he had to reach all the way back to Abe Lincoln.
While Lincoln may have been our greatest president, it’s worth noting he was president during the Civil War and was, of course, eventually assassinated, so I’m not sure you can call his efforts a complete success.
But Hickenlooper did quote Lincoln rather eloquently, and from memory. It’s worth hearing.
The quote came just after Lincoln had won re-election in 1864. “Now that the election is over,” he said, “may not all having a common interest reunite in a common fort to save our common country? For my own part, I have striven and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here, I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.”
When Hickenlooper finished, I thought how eloquent Lincoln’s words were and how, back in 1864, they would bring people to their feet. Of course, now it’s 2011.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
