Despite his train wreck of a campaign for governor Colorado this year, former congressman Scott McInnis says he hasn’t ruled out another run at political office.
McInnis, a Republican initially based in Glenwood Springs, Colo., served in the state legislature before winning a 1992 race for an open congressional seat from the Third District, which was essentially the Western Slope, Pueblo, and the San Luis Valley. The seat was open because the previous occupant, Ben Campbell (then a Democrat) was making a successful run for the U.S. Senate.
Term limits were fashionable then, and McInnis promised to serve no more than three two-year terms if elected. He served six terms before leaving office in 2005.
In early 2010, he had announced his candidacy for governor, and looked like the odds-on favorite to get the Republican nomination in a Republican year. His only competitor for the GOP nomination was Dan Maes, an Evergreen businessman who had never sought public office before, but who had attracted some Tea Party support — and a majority of delegates to the state GOP convention..
But before the Aug. 10 primary, the McInnis campaign derailed. Just after leaving Congress — and before he had hired on at a big-time Denver law firm — McInnis had lined up what he called a “sweet deal.” He got $300,000 over two years to write a series of water articles for the Hasan Family Foundation of Pueblo.
Responding to inquiries, the foundation released McInnis’s water writing. Much of it was rather banal, and it turned out that the good stuff was plagiarized, almost word for word, from work by Greg Hobbs, back when he was a water lawyer before his appointment to Colorado’s supreme court.
McInnis blamed his researcher, an 83-year-old retired water engineer, for failing to credit the material. The researcher, Rollie Fischer, said that McInnis had asked him to put together background material for a possible U.S. Senate run and never mentioned his Hasan writing project.
McInnis lost the primary to Maes, who went on to gather only 11 percent of the vote as the Democratic candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, cruised to election.
Well, the $300,000 has been repaid, McInnis says, and politicians sometimes manage to rehabilitate themselves. But even if McInnis claims to have put this behind him, Colorado voters may put it front and center for a long time to come if McInnis’s name should come up.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colorado
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