November 14, 2010 08:06 PM UTC

The Demise of the "Referendum C Republican"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Failed gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo penned a column for conservative website WorldNetDaily that everybody in the state needs to read–H/T to the Denver paper’s Tim Hoover. Tancredo, whose insurgent third-party bid for governor after the collapse of Scott McInnis under allegations of plagiarism failed to either prevent Democrat John Hickenlooper from achieving majority support or to force Republicans under 10% of the vote. The latter consequence, forcing Republicans into a soul-searching minor party status, by this time was more or less an explicit goal of Tancredo’s, and many of the strident conservative Republicans who went over to him.

And there’s a reason for that, beyond Dan Maes’ ineptitude or perceived slights to the base in favor of Scott McInnis. Tancredo believes, as he expresses in this WND column, that the GOP has “surrendered” its principles.

In Colorado, the state now has a liberal Democratic governor-elect, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and a split legislature. Republicans are in the majority in the House and Democrats control the Senate. In this situation, neither party can control the legislative agenda. The question conservatives in Colorado are asking is: Will the legislative agenda become truly “bipartisan,” or will Republicans be maneuvered into debating the details of compromises on the Democratic agenda?

To have a chance at genuine compromise and honest bipartisanship, Republicans must first have an agenda of their own. When leading Colorado Republicans like former Gov. Bill Owens join the Democratic governor-elect’s transition team, that serves to give the Democrats’ agenda a patina of “bipartisanship” at the outset. [Pols emphasis] When the Democratic agenda is baptized a “bipartisan agenda” on Day 1, by not only the liberal media and interest groups but by a group of co-opted Republicans, legislators who don’t buy into that agenda can be easily stigmatized as “partisan obstructionists.”

Selling out your party’s platform and policy agenda before the first shot is fired is a form of pre-emptive compromise that ought to be called by its right name: surrender…

All of the warning signs for the schism that has today split the Colorado Republican Party, and helped break the “Republican wave” at the polls in this state, were present years ago. In 2004, conservative Republicans willingly assisted in their own loss of the state legislature, turning on a moderate GOP representative named Ramey Johnson in Jefferson County who was deemed insufficiently conservative. Ramey Johnson’s fratricidal defeat led to the establishment of the Republican Study Committee of Colorado by Dave Schultheis, with the express purpose of codifying an ideological hard line among elected Republicans.

This hardening of the ideological right in early 2005, led by figures like Schultheis, Kent Lambert (whose name you’ll be hearing a lot next year), and Kevin Lundberg, came just as the campaign for two off-year ballot measures–Referendums C and D–was about to pit moderate Republicans against the ideologues like never before.

And the Colorado GOP has never recovered.

In 2010, five years after the narrow passage of Referendum C, the issue remains perhaps the biggest single litmus test among Colorado Republicans. Every Republican who supported Referendum C, which reduced the “ratchet effect” harm caused by 1992’s landmark Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights and allowed the state to keep some revenue that would otherwise be refunded, offsetting state budget cuts, has had to answer for it at one time or another since then. And some have paid for their support with their political careers.

The reason Referendum C passed in 2005 is the same reason why Republicans in Colorado failed to capitalize on the “Republican wave” in 2010. There was a recognition in 2005 among Colorado’s conservative-leaning but fiercely independent electorate that ideological rhetoric about “small government” had gone too far, and produced unintended consequences. Conservatives arguing against Referendum C could not explain why it’s okay for Colorado to rank near the very bottom of states for public funding of, just as one example, education. As much as people responded favorably to ideological catch phrases, their own eyes and common sense told them that there was a limit–that some government is necessary, and that the ideologues running the GOP just couldn’t be trusted to know how much cutting was too much.

In 2010, Republicans who supported Referendum C continued to pay for it. There is no better example than that of defeated Senate candidate Jane Norton: more than any other issue, her obligatory support for Referendum C as Lt. Governor under Bill Owens was aggressively used against her during her primary as evidence she was not a “true conservative.” Norton overcompensated for this criticism by trying to reinvent herself into a silly jingoist “War on Islam” caricature, while arguing unsuccessfully when forced that Referendum C “kept faith” with conservatives because it was a vote of the people.

Jane Norton lost her primary, above all, because she was not considered a “true conservative” by the ‘Tea Party’-energized Republican base. Then the “true conservative” choice, Ken Buck, proceeded to alienate a decisive segment of voters (women) that Norton would not have, while positioning himself inextricably to the right of what the voters in Colorado could stomach on just about every issue–even in the waviest of “wave years.” Responsible conservative-leaning independents, despite their anger at majority Democrats and President Obama, nevertheless couldn’t support Buck; or Tancredo for many similar reasons.

You see, folks, the ‘Tea Party’ isn’t anything new. The pundits call Colorado a ‘Tea Party’ state because the fact is, we’ve had them here influentially for much longer than the movement had a catchy name. Before there was a ‘Tea Party,’ there was a Republican Study Committee of Colorado. For years before anyone had ever heard of Jim DeMint, Colorado had Tom Tancredo, Jon Caldara, and Doug Bruce.

And they have failed. Their success in ideological dominance of the Colorado Republican Party has severely compromised the party’s long term success. From Ramey Johnson to Jane Norton, that failure is increasingly consequential.

Unfortunately, we have little good news beyond Owens’ largely symbolic bipartisanship to report for longsuffering moderates in the Republican Party, who realize perhaps better than anyone else how much this shift has cost them. Between the dominance in the Colorado Senate minority of hardcore types like Minority Leader Mike Kopp and Senate JBC appointee Kent Lambert, and presumptive Speaker* Frank McNulty’s brash early moves to reshape the Colorado House on the strength of a one-vote majority*–and now Tancredo leading the charge to discredit Republicans working on Gov.-elect John Hickenlooper’s transition–there’s very little to indicate that the forces in the GOP who chose to “purify” the party of moderates over victory plan to stop now.

We have said repeatedly that the strident ideological wing of the Colorado Republicans is the reason why they lose elections, and have held up the rare examples of moderates–Sen. Al White, former Rep. Don Marostica, and yes, former Gov. Bill Owens–as examples of how things could be different. Colorado’s swing to Democrats in recent years doesn’t mean we’ve become a ‘blue’ state, and election after election has now shown that lack of GOP success is attributable to their fielding candidates who please the ideological right but can’t win with our state’s practically-minded electorate–an electorate that would elect Republicans they could trust to be rational about governing. In short, we’ve been demonstrating the ‘Tea Party’s’ dilemma in Colorado for years, and our experience has shown that they do not learn from these mistakes. Indeed, the influence of the strident ideologues has only grown as the GOP’s electoral success in Colorado has waned.

And lucky for Democrats, Tancredo says the solution is to not change a thing.