October 20, 2010 09:08 PM UTC

I admit it… I voted a split ticket this year.

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• by: Go Raiders*

Just so you don’t have to read through all of my musings, I will let you know the split part up front:

Governor – Tom Tancredo

Treasurer – Cary Kennedy

Coroner (Arapahoe County) -Michael Doberson

The rest of my ballot was for Republican candidates.

Most years that I have voted, it has been pretty much for Republicans straight down the line, even in those pesky “non-partisan” races, we could always find out who was registered as what and kind of vote accordingly along party lines.

I didn’t anticipate that this year would really be any different, though I must admit that my anticipation was somewhat dated, say mid-2009.  At that time we had half a dozen or so credible potential Republican candidates for Governor and I figured that over the course of the next year or so I would get to know who they were and then vote for the one that I thought had the best chance of returning the Governorship to Republican control.   Boy was I wrong….  Who would have ever thought that all of the candidates would drop out early on the make way for the anointed one, Scott McInnis?  Well that is all but one, seems like some never heard of outlier guy named Dan Maes decided he was running regardless that people told him he had no chance.  To be honest, I kind of had to admire the guy for continuing to run, knowing he was up against the machine.

But then disaster struck, we found out that Scott McInnis really was a no-talent ass clown right before the primary, so what happened?  Republicans voted for Dan Maes to be the candidate figuring he couldn’t be any worse than a plagiarizer.  Wow, couldn’t have been more wrong there.  It turns out that Dan Maes was an even bigger no-talent ass clown than McInnis ever was.  I was somewhat shocked there as McInnis set the ass-clown bar pretty high, so it seemed like an incredible feat to all of a sudden make McInnis now look like the more credible candidate.   First we heard that Maes was a successful businessman, then the truth comes out that he is broke, and we are talking about generic beer and top ramen broke.  Then we find out that his campaign is actually turning out to be a job for him where he actually gets paid, I mean, “reimbursed”.  Then he tries to tell us that he was an undercover cop, and it turns out that he was less effective than Barney Fife.  I am not sure what he is going to tell us next about himself, that he is Santa Claus?  I am pretty sure that is not true.  In this case I wish some to the journalists in the Denver Pravda would have done some digging into the candidate’s background before the primary election, rather than waiting until after wards to drop the bomb on us.  Then again, that would never happen as the Pravda has been drooling all over themselves at the thought of a Governor Hickenlooper.

So what is a republican to do, we have stuck ourselves with a pathological liar as a candidate, and not even the kind of pathological liar that we can stomach.   I could have voted for Hickenlooper, but I just do not like his policies.  Something he said during the debates back when he was running for mayor still sticks in my craw.  When he was asked about how to handle the homeless situation in Denver, he proposed a multi-county tax, very similar to the stadium district tax, to pay for his initiatives.  That just bugged me as I never have been, no never will be, a resident of the City of Denver, but his solution was to have me pay a tax for a Denver problem.  That just bugs me when the first club to come out of the bag is to get some other people to pay for a problem that does not have a direct impact on them.  There are several other candidates out there running for that office, but considering I have never heard of any of them, or have only heard stupid things about them i.e.: the guy that put an ad on Craigslist for a Lieutenant Governor candidate, I didn’t give them any consideration.

So I voted for Tom Tancredo.  I know full well that Tom is a polarizing figure and that many people on this site detest him and call him all sorts of names, etc, but I think he is the best candidate for the job.  His views on a lot of things, not all but a lot, are more in line with mine than any of the other candidates in the race.    Based on the polling numbers, it appears that he may have a shot at winning the election as his numbers keep going up, while that other “Republican” candidate’s numbers keep going down.  This will really be a battle over the independent voters, but I think Tom does have some appeal to them.  In a race such as this one, wedge issues seem to boil to the top, and in that case Tom has a significant advantage in getting voters who want illegal immigration stopped to vote for him.

Treasurer’s Race:

I voted for Cary Kennedy, primarily because I think she has actually done a pretty good job managing the state’s finances during a recession.  Admittedly that is a tough job during any economic downturn, but she has done well.  While I do not like some of her politics, most notably amendment 23, as it put spending mandates on a collision course with Tabor, I just don’t see that as a reason that she should be fired from her job.  This normally would have been a difficult decision to come to, but considering that I have spoken to Walker Stapleton on several occasions, and he could never give me any real answers to my questions, it made the decision a lot easier.

Coroner’s Race (Arapahoe County)

Michael Doberson is the sitting County Coroner and is well qualified for the position.   He is an M.D., a PhD, and is board certified in forensic pathology.  That’s an impressive list of qualifications for that job.  The Republican candidate was someone that the Arapahoe County Republican powers that be talked into getting into the race about 5 minutes before the nomination process.  Anybody that has to be convinced by outside people to run for an office that they were clearly not interested in to begin with shouldn’t be there.  I would much rather have qualified people in that position rather than a political hack.

I actually put a lot of thought into how I voted this year and decided that the Party over person methodology no longer works for me.  If anyone is interested in how I voted for the amendments, just ask and I will be happy to share that as well.