January 04, 2016 01:58 PM UTC

Top Ten Stories of 2015 #7: Cory Gardner Makes Liars Of Everybody

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• by: Colorado Pols

By far the biggest defeat suffered by Colorado Democrats in 2014–and arguably the biggest loss for Democrats in this state since retaking control of the state legislature in 2004 and starting their roll toward political dominance here–was the narrow election of Cory Gardner to the U.S. Senate. Gardner’s defeat of Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Udall was a major reversal of fortune for Colorado Democrats after a string of victories both in line and in defiance of national political trends of recent years.

But in 2015, Gardner showed that his victory would come at a very high cost for his fellow Colorado Republicans, and a local press and pundit establishment that squandered enormous credibility on Gardner’s election. Since taking office a year ago, Sen. Gardner has swiftly proven his critics right on a range of issues that were key to his successful Senate campaign. At the same time he proved that his defenders on the campaign trail in 2014 were absolutely wrong, to the point of being complicit in a major deception that is now plain for all to see.

And that’s going to be a problem next time they have to sell someone like Cory Gardner.

When Gardner entered the U.S. Senate race in the spring of 2014, his first public act was to announce that he was no longer a supporter of the “Personhood” abortion bans that had repeatedly failed in statewide votes as ballot initiatives. Gardner was on the record steadfastly supporting these initiatives before they became a symbol of Republican backwardness on the issue, and his decision to walk back his prior strident opposition to abortion was obviously calculated and timed.

And it worked. Democrats, convinced they had Gardner pinned, pressed the attack single-mindedly over Gardner’s flip-flop, certain that he wouldn’t survive the contradiction. But not only did Gardner survive, he successfully turned Democratic fury over this shameless political dodge into an asset. Everyone knew Gardner was lying about his “change of heart,” as evidenced by his continued support for a functionally equivalent abortion ban at the federal level called the Life at Conception Act. But Gardner’s campaign brilliantly succeeded at turning Democratic frustration over their inability to “get Gardner” into a Moby Dick-style obsession in the eyes of the pundits.  Supposedly impartial journalists took up Gardner’s rejoinder “Mark Uterus,” freely broadcasting the new conventional wisdom that Udall’s attacks on Gardner over abortion had become a “tedious refrain.”

But history didn’t end with Gardner’s narrow victory over Sen. Udall. The insistence from the media and pundit class that Gardner “would post no threat to abortion rights” was immediately put to the test in 2015, and Gardner failed that test. In retrospect this should not have been a surprise, but Gardner’s repeated votes in favor of new abortion restrictions as a freshman U.S. Senator–especially in the context of the GOP’s year-long grandstand against Planned Parenthood last year–made liars of Gardner’s mainstream media defenders from 2014. After weeks of debunked hidden-camera video footage, investigation after fruitless investigation of Planned Parenthood by the federal and state level, and then the domestic terror attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs…how can anyone read what the pundits said about this issue in 2014 with a straight face?

Folks, not only were the pundits wrong about Gardner, they helped him pull off a sweeping deception of the people of Colorado. The damage to the credibility of outlets like the Denver Post who endorsed Gardner in defiance of all of their own stated values is easy to understand, and it is not being forgotten as they surely must have hoped. Such provable deception as Gardner’s campaign and subsequent actions as Senator does not simply become part of the background noise of public cynicism. It harms institutions we rely on as a society. It breeds contempt for our political system, and a sense of hopelessness that reduces participation. We know many Democrats were and remain eager to lay Gardner’s victory at the feet of his opponent, but what happened was bigger than Mark Udall.

It took a village to give us Cory Gardner.

Perhaps the only upshot in a story no one should be proud of is this: after the exasperated insistence from Colorado’s pundit class that Gardner would not be exactly what he turned out to be, voters will be less inclined to listen to them next time.