March 05, 2010 07:22 PM UTC

Tell Us How You Really Feel, Shawn Mitchell

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Sen. Shawn Mitchell is reliable about casting Republican image and message problems in embarrassingly sharp relief, often with a Beavis and Butthead flair that nobody else can quite match. Yesterday, he served up another fine object lesson–the Denver Post reports:

Democrats ripped state Sen. Shawn Mitchell on Thursday after he referred to a colleague as “Sen. OneYear,” implying Bruce Whitehead, D-Hesperus, is going to lose his upcoming election.

They said Mitchell’s comment was uncalled for and amounted to electioneering, which shouldn’t happen on the Senate floor.

“Sen. Mitchell, that is a pattern with you,” said Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge.

She noted that he recently shouted “Coward!” at another senator and the Senate president during a debate on tax credits.

And Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, said the Senate “is not a campaign office.”

“The mere fact that we are making flip electoral threats of sort while we are having public-policy discussion is never going to be appropriate,” she said.

Mitchell, a Broomfield Republican, said he had already acknowledged his remark was inappropriate.

“However, the line that I crossed was of being frivolous. It had nothing to do with mocking the man or his name or taking away his good reputation,” Mitchell said…

Democrats are correct that this kind of clearly election-fixated jab has no place in a legislative debate. The problem is that in order to concede that, Republicans would have to own up to the fact that virtually every legislative debate this session has devolved into exactly the same kind of election year posturing–they just didn’t always invoke it as bluntly as Mitchell did.

Much like the federal debates over legislation this year, Colorado Republicans are consciously taking the risk that turning every debate over policy into an electioneering vehicle, as they have eagerly done, will backfire with the voting public. They seem to view this as an acceptable risk, with the reward being continued buildup of popular angst they can ride to victory in November.

All we can say is, it had better work than Jim Bunning’s plan did, which fell apart in shame when he got a little too–key point here–obvious about it.