September 23, 2012 08:09 PM UTC

In-Depth Bio Humanizes, Devastates Joe Coors

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• by: Colorado Pols

We direct your attention this morning to a detailed and very well-written story on the life and candidacy of Republican Joe Coors, Jr., by reporter Lynn Bartels of the Denver paper. Due to a long-running dispute with the Denver paper we’re unable to directly quote any material from the story, but we encourage everyone to read it in its entirety.

We’re pretty sure that Joe Coors’ candidacy won’t survive this story.

Bartels begins with a detailed description of Joe’s early years, and time spent basically as an exile from the Coors family and its vast fortune over his decision to marry the woman he loved before attending college. In comparison to often-told stories about the rigid, perhaps even a bit sociopathic upbringing of most of the Coors family, Joe’s story really is interesting and indicative of character building. When Joe says he’s “not a beer,” there is a little more to that than simply not being involved in the core family business of brewing beer.

Unfortunately, Joe Coors is also unelectable.

We’ve made reference a couple of times now to a pair of similarly in-depth biographical stories from 1988 in the Los Angeles Times, which delved into the lives and worldviews of the Coors family and enterprising sons. One story presciently noted Joe’s brother Pete Coors’ desire to run for the U.S. Senate, which he unsuccessfully did do fourteen years later. The Times stories also talk about Joe Jr.’s split with the family, and eventual return to the fold.

That story is also where we learn, as Bartels dutifully brings up to date for the 2012 elections, that Joe Coors Jr. believes God talks to him on the golf course, and that he predicted Armageddon would occur in the year 2000. Although Joe had changed his views even by 1988, we learn that he once did indeed believe that AIDS was revenge by God on gay people–and that he still thinks homosexuality is, as the Times reported in 1988, an “abomination.”

More recently, as we’ve discussed in this space, Coors helped fund the “Personhood” abortion and birth control ban ballot initiative in 2010. Given the opportunity to respond, Coors says, according to Bartels, that he views himself as a “visionary,” not as “extreme”–whatever that means. Throughout the story, for as much humanizing depth it illuminates in Coors’ life, we can’t find any real attempt to respond to his firmly established record of electability-killing statements, views, actions like helping fund “Personhood,” any of it. He just says he’s “mellowed.”

Whatever that means.

Lynn Bartels has delivered in this story one of the most important pieces of journalism of the 2012 elections, giving CD-7 voters the most insight into this candidate they’re going to get before making their decision. Joe Coors is a real person with a rich life story, more nuanced than his family name suggests. And he has no business running for Congress.