February 02, 2022 09:58 AM UTC

Frank McNulty Running To Make Heidi Ganahl's Life Miserable

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• by: Colorado Pols

We were tipped off this morning about a filing yesterday by former Republican Speaker of the House Frank McNulty to run for the post of University of Colorado Regent, representing the state’s heavily conservative 4th congressional district after McNulty’s home in Highlands Ranch was lumped with most of the Eastern Plains on the new congressional district maps.

On McNulty’s freshly-deployed campaign website, a generic and neutrally-worded agenda:

Accountability starts at the top. The University of Colorado Board of Regents are accountable to the people of our state. That accountability passes to the University leadership, to the faculty and onto the students. It is increasingly important that students be accountable to their fellow students. This means respecting differences, entertaining conversation, and calling out bullies where they are. The Regents can set this tone with their voice and their actions. After all, if the school leadership is unable to be accountable to one another and to respect differing views, how can we expect faculty, staff, and students to do the same?

Just that tiny whiff of “respecting differing views” is the only hint you get that something political is at work here, before McNulty immediately segues into the matter of the University of Colorado’s search for a new President to replace the self-yeeted former Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy:

The University of Colorado is now hiring it’s next president and needs a world-class leader who will take us forward. There has been a partisan tug of war over the president in the last several years. This should stop, and I am committed to supporting an individual who represents the excellence of our University. We need common ground, continuity, and longevity in the tenure of our next CU President. As Regent, I will work to find that common ground around University leadership that is able to advance the Board, the University, and the larger CU community.

McNulty’s promise to end the “partisan tug of war over the president” is incredibly audacious considering that McNulty along with CU Regent At-Large (now running for governor) Heidi Ganahl played central roles in the partisan controversy over the hiring and failed tenure of Mark Kennedy. McNulty was picked to serve on the search committee for CU’s next president reportedly dominated by Republican “community members,” who steered the process away from such qualified choices as former Gov. Bill Ritter and leaders of much bigger university systems and toward the eventual “sole finalist” Congressman Kennedy. Kennedy proved a horrifyingly bad fit for Colorado’s flagship university, and came to personify the school’s veering from the path of academic rigor into politically-motivated “conservative affirmative action” championed by Kennedy’s predecessor Bruce Benson.

Audacity to the point of shameless is nothing new for McNulty, who founded a now-defunct and nakedly partisan “ethics watchdog” group to imitate the work of actual ethics watchdogs and bedevil Democratic candidates. Ever since McNulty presided over the loss of the Colorado House to Democrats in 2012, he’s been at the heart of failed schemes to regain power including attempts to meddle with the redistricting process to any degree the state’s new regulated process allowed.

Although McNulty himself won’t face much resistance getting elected to represent Ken Buck’s constituents on the Board of Regents, McNulty’s campaign is certain to result in even more “divisive questions” for Heidi Ganahl. Running statewide in a blue-trending state, the last thing Ganahl needs is to be reminded constantly about Mark Kennedy’s failure and the misguided campaign for “ideological diversity” at the University of Colorado. That leads directly to questions about Ganahl’s enthusiastic support for January 6th coup plotter John Eastman to serve as CU’s “Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy.” If Ganahl won’t answer those “divisive questions,” McNulty will have much less to risk–even if that means Ganahl gets burned.

It’s a brash move from a guy who has made a lot of costly political mistakes for his team over the years. And as is so often the case when audacity trumps good sense, the risk McNulty poses is not so much to himself.