February 24, 2010 02:45 AM UTC

What Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin Have in Common

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• by: Colorado Pols

Why that would be gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis of course, “the nation’s biggest ‘Tea Party’ candidate™!” That according to the semper fidelis American Spectator:

Democrat Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has formally announced that he’ll jump into Ritter’s boots. But to attain the governor’s office Hickenlooper will have to beat the Republican who would have been Ritter’s toughest opponent, former Congressman Scott McInnis, who was leading Ritter roughly 48%-40% in previous polls. But a February 8 Rasmussen poll has Hickenlooper over McInnis 49-45, inside the margin of error, and promising a horse race. This turnaround reflects Hickenlooper’s popularity on the urban Front Range.

McInnis is a no-nonsense conservative accustomed to abuse doled out by Colorado’s Green Left, as he’s cut from the same cloth as Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. [Pols emphasis] Western Colorado is prime oil shale and natural gas country, and McInnis has never been shy about his pro-drill-baby-drill views. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has recently ordered stricter reviews of potential Bureau of Land Management (BLM) energy leases across the West, adding more legal and bureaucratic obstacles for energy companies to surmount. These coupled with Colorado’s already stringent new energy development laws has McInnis bristling on the stump: “What those rules and regulations did, frankly, was take Colorado from No. 1 to rock bottom of states that are friendly to do natural gas and energy business in,” he said in a speech to a Colorado Mining Association meeting in Denver last week.

We’d say the only place left to go from here is Scott “The Gipper” McInnis, which we can expect to see about any time at at the rate he’s going. Everybody do note that McInnis is front-paging this article on his own campaign website, so presumably he invites these comparisons. Which is all fine and dandy, but isn’t Dick Cheney about as popular these days as a root canal? And is “Manly Sarah Palin” really the image he wants going into the general election?