The Colorado governor’s race took another twist last week with the front-runner and Democratic candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, getting accused of “trashing” rural residents.
The accusation came from his principal challenger, former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo, who entered the race in August as the nominee of the American Constitution Party. The Republican candidate, Dan Maes, is struggling at about 10 percent in recent polls.
It came about after a 2009 television interview with Hickenlooper surfaced on Oct. 22. The topic was the Matthew Shepard foundation. Shepard, a gay college student, was beaten to death by two men near Laramie, Wyo., in 1998. His parents established a foundation to combat such bigotry, and headquartered it in Denver.
The interviewer, Eden Lane, asked why they would have chosen Denver, even though “they didn’t live in Colorado, he didn’t go to school in Colorado, there really wasn’t that strong a connection. What do you think is it about the environment here in Denver that allowed them to choose this as their home?”
Hickenlooper replied that “the tragic death of Matthew Shepard occurred in Wyoming. Colorado and Wyoming are very similar. We have some of the same, you know, backwards thinking in the kind of rural Western areas you see in, you know, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico.”
Now, anyone who’s ever lived in the rural West for more than a week knows that we have some “backwards thinking” out here in the boondocks (and from what I can tell, there’s a considerable amount of it in our urban areas as well). So that statement didn’t seem like any sort of bombshell.
But Tancredo jumped on it anyway, issuing a press release that stated: “To suggest that people in rural Colorado are ‘backwards’ because they don’t share your left-wing values reinforces once again just how out of touch you are.” And so, “Mr. Mayor, you owe the people of rural Colorado an apology. To compare all of rural Colorado to the monsters who killed Matthew Shepard is outrageous.”
Naturally, Tancredo also tied “Hickenlooper’s condescending comments” to Barack Obama’s 2008 “they get bitter” statement about rural communities. It inspired considerable commentary on a Colorado political website.
I’ve lived in rural Colorado for most of my life. It does have its “backward” attributes. Some are good, like knowing your neighbors and helping each other, and some can get close to evil, like xenophobia. One learns to cherish the beneficial aspects of backwardness while fighting the malicious portions. It does no good to pretend that the backwardness does not exist.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colorado.
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