March 16, 2010 12:23 AM UTC

Oh No He Didn't, Tom Lucero Edition

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• by: Colorado Pols

There are days when we feel genuinely bad for CD-4 also-ran candidate Tom Lucero, like at last week’s congressional debate–as reported by the Longmont Times-Call:

For 90 minutes on Thursday, the four candidates for the 4th Congressional District in the Republican Party varied only slightly in their responses.

Then Referendum C came up…

Tom Lucero, a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, said the regents supported the measure. Even with the additional money in the state budget, higher education has seen a 60 percent cut in funding, he said, and it would have been much worse without Referendum C.

Others disagreed.

“Referendum C was wrong,” Dean Madere said. “The answer is, find the money elsewhere.”

Rep. Cory Gardner said he bucked his own party in opposing Referendum C.

“It wasn’t a TABOR timeout; it was a TABOR blowout,” Gardner said…

We’d love to get Cory Gardner and Jane Norton in the same room to debate Referendum C, would be interesting to see who gets more uncomfortable. Beyond that, you have to feel some sympathy for Lucero, who made only the mistake of relating his experience on the issue–dodging a catastrophic budget cut to the University of Colorado. But doing that, as Rush Limbaugh likes to put it, “skewered the sacred cow” for Republican faithful in the room.

The dogpile that followed pretty much couldn’t be helped.