March 28, 2010 06:35 PM UTC

Hickenlooper's New Groove

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• by: Colorado Pols

You’ll like what he said this weekend better than last, the Fort Collins Coloradoan reports:

Colorado gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper said that in government, like business, it’s never beneficial to get a bad reputation.

“You learn in the restaurant business that there’s no margin in having enemies,” the Democratic candidate said.

Hickenlooper was in Fort Collins on Friday, visiting with businesses and their owners as he toured Northern Colorado for his campaign. Sitting down with seven community members at Everyday Joe’s, 144 S. Mason St., Fort Collins. Hickenlooper said governments and businesses are similar in some aspects. Just as no business benefits from unsatisfied customers, government also works better when the constituents are happy with what they’re getting…

As Hickenlooper spoke about the importance of finding efficiencies in government spending, Bill Ward, president of locally based Ward Petroleum, asked Hicken-looper to give specifics on how to cut budgets.

“Bird by bird,” Hickenloop-er replied, saying it’s helpful to have experts go through a budget line by line and find places where unnecessary expenses can be trimmed.

Hickenlooper also spoke about energy, recognizing that in the future petroleum will run out, and he praised Gov. Bill Ritter for helping set the road for a long transition to a reliance on natural energy.

“What Gov. Ritter has done to define Colorado as a new energy economy, I think it makes the state look good,” he said. [Pols emphasis]

In an interview before his meeting, Hickenlooper also said he valued education and recognized a correlation between strong economies and places that invest in education.

Now by “investment” we assume he does mean taxes, so presumably that means he no longer thinks making sacrifices to protect those investments during hard economic times, like his fellow Democrats in the legislature did this year, and like Hickenlooper himself did by raising certain fees in the Denver city budget, is “crazy.”

Mayor Hickenlooper learned a valuable lesson last week, and hopefully it came early enough to prevent this kind of thing from happening again–as the leader of your party, which you are like it or not as the nominee for the state’s highest office, you cannot just throw your colleagues under the wheels to score throwaway political points. In the interest of comity, we’re not going to get in to details of just how angry Democrats in the legislature were over Hickelooper’s casual disparagement of their hard choices last week–suffice to say they were very, very angry.

Between then and now, Hickenlooper has reportedly had private meetings with legislators and Governor Ritter, and has by all accounts expressed contrition for his poor choice of words before the South Metro Chamber of Commerce. Based on this article in the Coloradoan, he’s had another opportunity to screw up–and he didn’t.

That’s good news for Hickenlooper, state house Democrats, not to mention their staff–who would really rather not have to defensively prove their own candidate for governor wrong/hypocritical every time he makes a campaign appearance. Getting Hickenlooper back on message will also help encourage interest groups to go ahead and throw down the independent expenditures that Democrats up and down the ticket will be counting on this year.

As we’ve said before, you can’t say with certainty that Hickenlooper disparaging the work of fellow Democrats hurts his candidacy, in fact you can make a pretty good case that it doesn’t. But Hickenlooper is going to need a friendly majority in the legislature to function effectively–he won’t be as effective with hostile Republicans running the show, and he won’t like it much better with a Democratic majority he alienates during the campaign. Ask anybody who works at the Capitol what the biggest problem in the last four years has been (other than the Great Recession and TABOR), and they’ll tell you it’s poor communication between the Governor and the legislature.

This spat could be just the object lesson Hickenlooper needs to avoid the same situation–a few more uncontroversial stump speeches and we’ll know for sure that he gets it.