August 12, 2010 08:00 PM UTC

Why my Bennet-Bitterness will last a bit longer

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• by: Timberline

Usually, watching Keith Olberman’s Countdown is a guilty pleasure sure to improve my mood after a rough day. Yesterday evening, when I was finally over my hangover and my initial disappointment at Romanoff’s loss, and possibly because I was visiting my parents, who actually own a TV, I decided that turning on Olberman would be a good way to improve my day. Instead, the few minutes of his show that I was able to watch brought home exactly why Bennet’s victory upset me.

Since I’m relatively new to actually writing anything on this site (although I’ve read it quite religiously for some time now), I think I ought to give a bit of information about myself to help clarify why I see politics the way I do. For one thing, I have to confess that I actually care very little about national politics. I’m a fifth generation Coloradan. I’ve only left the state a handful of times, and don’t plan on going anywhere else anytime soon. The issues that I really care about are the environment, gay rights, and the rights of immigrants who contribute so much to our state but receive so little for their efforts, just because they don’t have all the right papers. All of those, at least to me, are policies whose facets are best addressed at the state, rather than the national, level.

For me, then, the right Senator is someone who will devote themselves to the facets of those three issues which do have to be addressed in the national arena: a cap-and-trade bill, repealing DOMA, and the DREAM Act. Both Romanoff and Bennet fit that bill fairly well. Romanoff, in my opinion, fits the bill even better than Bennet (principally due to his stance on federal marriage equality legislation, whatever Voyageur might say). Still, I would (and will) have no problems voting for either of them in a general election, which is why I wanted to get over my sadness at Romanoff’s loss as quickly as possible. At the very least, I could brooding and start canvassing my precinct for Hickenlooper or the No on 60/61/101 campaigns — things I care about a lot more than the Senate race, in all honesty.

Olberman, with his fiery rhetoric, would, I thought, be just the ticket to get me excited about politicking again. Unfortunately, he had just the opposite effect — because one of his lead stories was on the nationwide primaries, including Colorado. In Olberman’s defense, much of my anger could have been diffused if he had simply pronounced the name of our state as ‘Colo-raa-do,’ instead of ‘Colo-rah-do.’ His pronunciation is probably technically considered correct throughout most of the nation, but it couldn’t help but remind me that he is not from our State, and that his commentary is that of an outsider.

The substance, rather than the sound of his speech is what really set me off, however. His entire coverage of the story was simply that Obama had backed Bennet, and Bennet won, and, therefore, Obama won.

Indeed, it seemed like the media’s entire focus on the story was that OBAMA had beat Romanoff — not that Bennet had. The front page story in The-Paper-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named today was guilty of the same sin, focusing so much on Obama that I have a hard time believing that anything about Bennet himself, besides his position as a cog in the national system, really did lead to his victory.

Let’s face it — Bennet is not a particularly distinguished superintendent, public speaker, or Senator. It’s frankly very hard to get excited or emotionally stirred by either his personality or his campaign. When I hear a story about Colorado on the national news, I want it to be about an issue that is relevant to me as a Coloradan — not about how our Senator is more-or-less just a tool of the Obama administration.

Following his coverage of the Democratic Senate primary, Olberman went on to explore the fact that more Republicans had turned out that Democrats in the primary, again focusing on the national implications of the story (Tea Party motivation? Anti-administration bitterness?), rather than the more reasonable local explanations. “Colorado has a ton of independents who will probably swing Democrat in the general,” I shouted at the TV. “And there were two major Republican races, but Democrats only had one big fight.”

Why couldn’t Olberman just try to understand the local issues a bit, instead of framing everything in a national context, I wondered?

And then it struck me — probably because the Romanoff/Bennet story really isn’t a local story. Olberman isn’t the only one that sees the senate race as a product of national, rather than local, politics. He’s in good company with Senator  Bennet, whose rhetoric is so filled with vague national issues that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him address something that I thought was Colorado-specific, besides Pinon Canyon. So I’m going to let myself be bitter for a little longer. At least until I can come to terms with the fact that our Senate race isn’t about Colorado as much as it’s about Washington.

I must confess that I’ve often disagreed with Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, and Ben Nelson for bucking the national party on issues that I care about to cater to their constituencies. But I’ll say one thing for them — at least they remember that their job in the Senate is to represent the voters of their state, and not the Democratic Party.