When John Hickenlooper adopted a policy of not running negative ads back in his days as a Denver mayoral candidate, cynics predicted this allegedly naive stand would vanish once he plunged into the rough-and-tumble of partisan state politics. Well, he’s now been elected twice as Colorado’s governor, and his campaign advertising has maintained a consistently upbeat tone.
Hickenlooper’s latest victory has proved again that you can win with a positive message. It also proves that in purple Colorado, at least, you can seek to govern as a centrist without voters spurning you as a political freak.
Yes, we know: Outside groups spent lots of money battering Hickenlooper’s opponent, Bob Beauprez, in negative ads, some of which made false charges regarding how the Republican operated his former bank. But the negativity quotient in the race clearly tilted more against Hickenlooper than Beauprez, and so did the nastiest content, for that matter.
No single ad was more outrageously false than one claiming the governor threatened to grant freedom to mass murderer Nathan Dunlap. That was preposterous, and the authors of the ad knew it.
For his part, Beauprez ran a mostly solid campaign — with the exception of one sleazy ad that accused the governor of making the state unsafe. Beauprez also offered voters a clear choice with his governing agenda. However, it was a consistently conservative agenda despite Colorado’s large number of moderate, unaffiliated voters. Hickenlooper continues to appeal to many of those moderates, even if his image has been damaged by controversial legislation and by his own missteps that at times made him look indecisive on key issues.
In his remarks Wednesday after he’d been declared the victor, Hickenlooper warned that this was “not the time to be complacent” about the state’s economy, despite recent progress, while pledging to focus on making sure “every single community in Colorado is able to tap into this state’s vitality.” That’s the right focus, and it will require not only a dedicated governor but also a legislature that does its part in removing impediments to growth while funding such keys to the future as infrastructure and education.
It might also require the governor to pick up his veto pen more often than he did in his first term.
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