July 20, 2011 11:32 PM UTC

And That's Why I'm Running for Congress...Somewhere in Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

One of the quirks that come in a redistricting year is that the Federal Election Commission is a bit lax on requiring candidates seeking a Congressional office to actually state which office they plan to run for. Take, for example, the case of Democrat Perry Haney, a wealthy Greenwood Village chiropractor who wants to run for Congress…somewhere.

Haney has been meeting with Democrats in Colorado and in Washington D.C., telling them that he plans to run for Congress, but he won’t say where he plans to kickoff his campaign. Is it against Republican Rep. Mike Coffman (and Democratic challenger Joe Miklosi) in CD-6? Is it to take on Republican Rep. Scott Tipton in CD-3, where Democrat Sal Pace has been running full-steam ahead for months?

We visited his website, paid for by “The Perry Haney for Congress Exploratory Committee,” to “explore” that question, and it doesn’t indicate anywhere that he has decided where he will run, though a look at some of the pictures and the text makes it appear as though he’s definitely leaning more towards CD-3 than anywhere else. We did get a kick out of his issue statement “On Career Politicians,” where Haney talks, of course, about how he is not a career politician; but he’s got the career politician thing figured out, it seems, since he won’t even commit to a district.

Haney recently sent a mail piece to Democratic delegates in CD-3 that left a UPS Store P.O. Box in Grand Junction as the return address, giving more indication that he may, perhaps, choose to run in Southern and Western Colorado (though he never explicitly says in the letter that he is running for Congress in CD-3). If he does run there, he will have a lot of explaining to do about being a wealthy Denver resident with little previous involvement in politics. Haney has made several donations to Democrats over the years, but he has also donated regularly to Republicans; Haney gave Scott McInnis a $500 check in his campaign for Colorado governor in 2009, $250 to Republican Attorney General Gale Norton in 1995, and $200 to the National Republican Congressional Committee in 1996. This won’t help him earn any friends in a Democratic primary, either.

We don’t see how Haney could possibly win a Democratic primary wherever he ultimately decides to run for Congress. We hear that he does have some personal wealth that he might commit to a campaign, and he had better hope so — we don’t see him raising much money as an unknown Denverite with no natural base in CD-3 or CD-6. But maybe he’ll figure this out as part of his grand “exploration.”