Thirty years old and new to politics, she has in short order become director of the Northern Colorado Tea Party and state coordinator of the national Tea Party Patriots, leading some of the had-it-up-to-here conservatives who have flipped the Senate race in this swing state upside down.
Now the Tea Party-favored candidate in the Aug. 10 Republican primary, Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck, has gone from long shot to front-runner in his race against former lieutenant governor Jane Norton, who is backed by the Republican establishment.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Michael Bennet, appointed 18 months ago, faces his own primary drama. Bennet, endorsed by President Obama, is being challenged by former state House speaker Andrew Romanoff, endorsed by former president Bill Clinton. Their rivalry reflects unease among Democrats.
So in a state many hailed in 2008 as the nation’s new bellwether, the Senate race has become a primer of the politics of 2010: A Republican Party driven by Tea Party activism, for one, and a Democratic Party trying to rally its base despite concern about the lagging economy and disappointment over the pace of change since Obama’s election.
Buck’s rise is particularly notable in a state like Colorado, not the most natural Tea Party territory. In 2008, Obama easily carried the Rocky Mountain State, which has a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators.
Even so, dismissed as a serious candidate at the beginning of the year, Buck now leads Bennet and Romanoff in an automated. Rasmussen poll taken July 8. The survey of 500 likely voters has a margin of error of +/–4.5 percentage points.
Findings like that fuel Republicans’ hopes that they could win control of the Senate this fall. To do that, the GOP needs a net gain of 10. seats, including pick-ups in swing and Democratic-leaning states such as Delaware, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
And in Colorado, where the race is rated a toss-up by the non-partisan Cook Political Report .
“It’s a very topsy-turvy year,” Romanoff says.
In most campaigns, a political résumé has been a plus. This time, it looms as a toxic asset among the most energized voters — conservatives outraged by the growing power and cost of government.
“She has more establishment ties,” Hollywood says disapprovingly of Norton as the Tea Party organizer surveys the Boulder County Republican Summer Social. Buck wins applause when he addresses the crowd, but Norton cancels at the last minute and the young aide who fills in for her is heckled.
“Look at her ties to John McCain and her ties to Bill Owens,” Hollywood says disapprovingly, referring to the Republicans’ 2008 presidential nominee and Colorado’s most recent GOP governor.
Among voters aligned with the Tea Party movement, she says, “They look at those and say, ‘Those people were part of the problem.’”
Getting ready for November
Norton has been moving to the right, at least in her rhetoric, while Buck seems to be sliding to the center.
In an interview, Buck sidesteps some of the furors that have trailed other Tea Party-backed Senate contenders, including Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada. Both won GOP primaries only to become enmeshed in controversies over whether their views were out of the mainstream.
Before the Boulder picnic begins, Buck outlines positions he calls more “nuanced” than those attributed to him in the past, when he said his views had been “distilled” and shorthanded by reporters.
He embraces Social Security as an important commitment to seniors, though he once questioned whether the government should be administering the program. He says he doesn’t want to eliminate the Department of Education, though he would like to convert its programs into block grants that preserve more local and state control.He says there is “no question in my mind” that Obama was born in the United States — an explosive issue among some Tea Partiers — but also says he “wouldn’t have a problem” with legislation requiring presidential candidates to produce a birth certificate.
Then there’s immigration, an issue that has helped energize his support. As a prosecutor, he authorized a raid on a tax preparer who had been sanctioned for helping illegal immigrants prepare returns. Nearly 5,000 files were seized in an effort to locate stolen Social Security numbers.
A district court called the raid “inappropriate.”
Buck supports Arizona’s tough new immigration law but says the limited resources of law enforcement should be directed at securing the border and arresting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. It’s unrealistic to try to deport all illegal immigrants, he says in the interview. Once the border has been secured, he doesn’t rule out considering a path to legal status for those who are here illegally.
A half-hour later, however, his tone is sharper, his voice louder and his emphasis different when he stands on a makeshift stage to address the crowd. At 6-foot-3. and with close-cropped silver hair, he is an imposing, plain-spoken presence. As a young lawyer, he was hired by then-congressman Dick Cheney to work on the Iran-contra investigation.
“People are sick and tired of the answer coming out of Washington, D.C., always being more government,” Buck shouts into the hand-held microphone. The problem isn’t just Democrats, he says: “We send Republicans to Washington, D.C., to change Congress and those Republicans are changed by Washington, D.C. It is time that Republicans start acting like Republicans again.”
He defends the Arizona law as an effort to complement federal efforts to protect U.S. citizens and ridicules the Justice Department’s lawsuit challenging it. “The federal government isn’t suing the cities that have declared themselves a sanctuary (for illegal immigrants) and have thumbed their nose at federal law,” he says. “Does that make sense to any in this room?” The crowd boos in agreement.
For Buck, 51, walking a line between energizing conservative supporters in the primary and appealing to more moderate voters in the fall can be complicated. That was apparent when former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo. addressed a rally for Buck in Denver the other day.
Tancredo catalogued perils the U.S. has faced, from the Civil War to al-Qaeda, then declared that “the greatest threat to the country that was put together by the Founding Fathers is the guy that is in the White House today.”
Buck didn’t applaud the line on stage, and he distanced himself from it as soon as the rally was over. “I love Tom; don’t always agree with him,” he told reporters. “I don’t think the man in the White House is the greatest threat to this country at all.” In a conference call later, he said he respected Obama.
Then Norton, 55, weighed in. “There was a real measure of truth in what Tancredo said,” she wrote on her Facebook page, saying “Obama’s brand of big government is a threat to America.”
Two days later, at the Conservative Western Summit, Buck said there was “a lot of truth in what Tom Tancredo said,” though he added that “the greatest threat, folks, is not a single man, but rather the progressive liberal movement that is going on in this country.”
Starting at the top
The least experienced candidate in this race is the Democratic incumbent.
Bennet, 45, had never run for office when Gov. Bill Ritter appointed him to fill the Senate seat vacated by Ken Salazar, who became Obama’s Interior secretary. Bennet was born in New Delhi, where his father worked for the U.S. ambassador. He grew up in Washington, D.C.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Bennet worked in the Clinton Justice Department, then became managing director for the Anschutz Investment Company. in Denver. He served as chief of staff to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who then appointed him as the city’s school superintendent.
“He’s not someone those of us on this side of the Continental Divide had heard of,” says Bruce Christensen, mayor of Glenwood Springs, in western Colorado. He and about 30 other local residents are waiting in Anita Sherman’s back yard for a chance to chat with the senator at a $25-a-head fundraiser. Bennet arrives with wife Susan Daggett and their three young daughters, casually dressed for a hot afternoon.
The senator, conciliatory and low-key, apologizes for his limits as a novice campaigner, makes his political pitch and then fields friendly questions for an hour.
Afterward, sitting on Sherman’s front deck as his daughters get drenched playing on an inflatable water slide in the yard, Bennet says the primary challenge was unwelcome — the White House talked to Romanoff about accepting a job in the administration instead — but in some ways has been helpful.
The campaign has been forced to spend money and launch TV ads “earlier than we intended and probably would have wanted,” he says. “But on the other hand it’s made us sharpen our game. …We’re better than we were as a campaign. I hope I’m getting better as a candidate. I think I am.”
Bennet discounts policy differences between him and Romanoff and says he’s confident Democrats will unite in November.
At a $50-a-head fundraiser that night, however, Romanoff ticks off his differences with Bennet on policy, from health care to climate change, and hammers at the campaign contributions Bennet has taken from corporate interests, including in the banking and oil industries. “We need a senator for the rest of us,” Romanoff tells about 100 supporters sipping wine in the Space Gallery, an art gallery in Denver’s funky Santa Fe neighborhood.
Romanoff, 43, trounced Bennet at the state’s Democratic caucuses in March but has been far outspent by him since then. The senator’s 6-point. lead in one statewide poll in March had widened to 17 points in a Denver Post poll last month.
Bennet acknowledges he has had to build a political organization from scratch — and at a time some Democrats are disenchanted and Republicans energized. The percentage of Colorado voters registered as Democrats has been almost static since the 2008 election while the percentage of Republicans has gone up a bit.
Steve Bieringer, 63, a former field representative for the AFL-CIO attending the Space Gallery fundraiser, says Romanoff “has a very, very strong base among Democrats who are unhappy with the direction of the Democratic Party,” including what he sees as a growing orientation toward business. If Bennet wins the nomination, Bieringer says, “I’m going to think long and hard” about what to do.
He might write in a name or just not cast a vote, he says: “I’d be sending a message that the Democrats are off track.”
What message are Colorado voters trying to send? In separate interviews, the four Senate candidates use strikingly similar language to answer.
“We are so sick of the establishment,” Buck says of himself and his Tea Party backers.
“Angry, frustrated,” Romanoff says in describing the electorate. “They’re not just skeptical but cynical and hopeless.”
Norton, talking over coffee in a Denver hotel, calls voters “nervous, frightened, angry.” She adds: “They feel like their country is slipping away.”
When he addresses audiences, Bennet says, he hears concerns about the economy, the growing federal debt and the nation’s future whether the crowd is made up of liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans.
“Once you get past the first salvo of unhappiness and anger,” he says, “the content of the conversation isn’t really any different.”
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