The New Yorker
Comment
On the Trail
by _Steve Coll_
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/steve_coll/search?contributorName=steve
coll) February 10, 2014
Last month, Colorado opened its first retail marijuana shops. At the
Colorado Springs airport, there are now bins to help departing travellers
remember to drop their pot before flying off to less liberated states. The law
legalizing marijuana in Colorado was the result of a long grass-roots campaign
that culminated, in 2012, in a winning ballot vote, and was one of the
most surprising left-libertarian successes in recent years. But pot
legalization (Washington State has approved a similar law) is a difficult
political
harbinger to categorize.
Colorado has a free-range-inspired history, and the new law might be
understood as the latest reimagining of frontier freedom. It has not been a
mellowing project, however. The campaign was fought amid a series of bruising
battles over social and economic issues—gun control, fracking, taxes, school
reform, and civil unions for gay couples—that Colorado and its Democratic
governor, John Hickenlooper, Jr., have been engaged in during the years of
President Obama’s Administration.
The state’s unruliness can be explained in part by the electoral math.
Registered voters are almost equally split among Democrats, Republicans, and
independents. Colorado’s political statutes allow citizens to introduce
ballot initiatives, a situation that encourages populist campaigning on
unconventional issues. A rising Latino population has enlivened the
immigration
debate. And an oil and natural-gas drilling boom has exacerbated long-running
arguments about land rights and environmentalism. The midterm elections
will likely be closely contested and fuelled by heavy spending by outside
interests, and the results may help to define President Obama’s electoral
legacy. One of his greatest political achievements has been to revive or
solidify the Democratic Party’s standing in the West, particularly in
Colorado,
Washington, Nevada, Oregon, and New Mexico. He was the first Democratic
Presidential candidate to prevail in Colorado since 1992, and he did so twice.
In addition to the governorship, Democrats now hold both houses of the
legislature and both U.S. Senate seats. During the next two years, Democrats
across the country—not only the presumptive Presidential favorite, Hillary
Clinton, but many candidates for the Senate and the House—will have to decide
how best to recast the Party’s ideas and campaign narratives for the
post-Obama era, without giving up the political territory that he has
conquered.
It is not at all obvious how they should go about that. The task has been
further complicated by the President’s approval ratings, which have been
pulled down by the dismal Obamacare rollout and, especially, by his inability
to get anything through Congress. As in 2010, the President’s struggles in
Washington may undermine Democrats this year, too.
Some Democrats see promise in a bolder conviction politics—in the
unabashedly progressive platform and rhetoric that lifted New York Mayor Bill
de
Blasio to office in November, and in the pointed critique of inequality
offered by Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts. Obama and his allies in
the Party leadership, however, are charting a more cautious course—no doubt
with an eye on the coming midterms. In last week’s State of the Union
address, the President emphasized some populist ideas that poll well with
independent voters, such as raising the minimum wage and giving tax breaks to
companies that create jobs for Americans. Yet he said nothing about Wall
Street
pay or union-organizing, and barely mentioned gun control—something that
he championed last year, after the elementary-school shooting in Newtown,
Connecticut, by trying to push Congress to buck the gun lobby and pass modest
restrictions. It was a noble attempt, but it failed after a compromise
worked out by Senators Joe Manchin and Patrick Toomey couldn’t attract enough
votes, and the reality of that failure is that Democrats in the West and
the South must now run away from a reform that the President once ardently
promoted.
This year, in Colorado, Senator Mark Udall faces a difficult reëlection
fight. His race is one of some half a dozen that could determine whether
Democrats maintain control of the Senate as the 2016 Presidential primary
campaigns begin. Whether Udall—or incumbents in those other races, including
Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, and Mark Pryor, of Arkansas—still regards the
President’s support as an asset isn’t certain. After the State of the Union,
CNN asked the Senator if he would invite Obama to campaign with him. Udall
dodged. “Coloradans are going to reëlect me based on my record, not on the
President’s record,” he said.
Governor Hickenlooper has suffered whiplash on gun policy, too. Early last
year, he pushed through legislation—similar to the bill that failed in the
Senate—after Newtown and the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theatre in
Aurora. That legislation requires background checks on buyers in private gun
sales, and limits an assault rifle’s magazine to fifteen rounds. These are
hardly radical restrictions, but gun-control advocates hailed the legislation
as a template for how courageous Democrats in rural and Southern states can
defy the National Rifle Association and enact new limits. Nevertheless,
the N.R.A. supported recall votes in Colorado that cost two state senators
who were allies of Hickenlooper their seats; a third resigned, fearing
defeat. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to think about how to do things
differently,” the Governor remarked recently about the backlash the
legislation
created. “I think we were ahead of parts of the state.”
Hickenlooper also faces reëlection in November. His ambivalence about his
own gun bill reveals his capacity for political resilience; he is an
accessible and winsome candidate. And he, along with Democrats across the
country,
will be helped by the Republican Party’s remarkably persistent
self-destructive tendencies. According to the polls, the candidate most likely
to win
the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Colorado this year is Tom
Tancredo, the former congressman and anti-immigration campaigner who once
called
Miami “a Third World country,” because of its many Spanish speakers.
Hickenlooper defeated Tancredo in 2010.
The Democratic Party is hardly leaderless or adrift. Yet it is the type of
experimentation that Hickenlooper conducts in his reëlection bid that will
shape the Party’s evolution. In 2008, then Senator Obama accepted the
nomination for the Presidency in Denver’s Mile High Stadium. A crowd of
eighty-four thousand waved “Change” signs. Washington, as we all know by now,
proved substantially intractable. Democrats will be watching Colorado again
this year, hoping that it will show them another path to victory. ♦
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