May 24, 2011 09:07 PM UTC

Friendly Fire Aversion Leads To Romer Advisor Bailouts

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• by: Colorado Pols

FOX 31’s Eli Stokols reported over the weekend:

Three members of Chris Romer’s so-called “kitchen cabinet”, informal advisers who are not on the campaign payroll, quit the mayoral candidate’s campaign earlier this week, several sources tell FOX 31 Denver.

Chris Gates, Paul Lhevine and Mark Eddy all left the campaign on Wednesday over growing concerns that the campaign’s message and tone were going in the wrong direction — a negative direction…

Sources close to the situation tell FOX 31 Denver that Hickenlooper, or the three advisers’ allegiance to him, played no part in their individual decisions to quit the campaign.

“They made these decisions on their own,” a source said.

What we’ve heard about this corroborates Stokols’ account of the departure of these three advisors. As with other divisive intraparty elections, there are always splits that occur between otherwise fast friends, co-workers, and political allies. Emotions that run high during Democratic primary and other blue-on-blue campaigns often take a long time to cool just like Republican primaries (see: Bennet, Michael and Norton, Jane for examples from both sides). The desire to avoid “going negative,” thus preserving goodwill between once and future friends, was probably always futile in this Denver mayoral race, which means that maybe the departure of these advisors from Chris Romer’s campaign always was too. In short, we see no reason to question Stokols’ explanation for their departure, or to criticize it as reported.

Those of you weighing the net value of this “inside baseball” story, for which we have just significantly increased the total coverage, versus other issues being widely discussed in the mayoral race, might come away unconvinced that this will sway the results one way or the other. This is more about keeping things peaceful between insiders over lunch at The Palm–important for that set, surely, but do keep it in perspective. The voters are likely to care…a little less.

UPDATE: More commentary and some details on the players involved here.