Some say the West has its own version of the Kennedy
clan – the Udalls. A generation of Westerners has heard of Morris
Udall, the former Arizona congressman, and Stewart, his brother,
former secretary of the Interior. These days it’s their sons who
are in the news. Morris’ son Mark, now a Colorado state legislator,
is running for Congress, while New Mexico Attorney General Tom
Udall, son of Stewart, competes in a three-way race for the state’s
northern House seat.
Colorado’s second district,
which has elected a Democrat in every election since 1974,
stretches along the Front Range and includes Denver’s northern
suburbs and the city of Boulder. Udall easily won his state
Legislature seat in Boulder two years ago, and the former director
of the Colorado Outward Bound School is now up against Bob
Greenlee, a pro-choice businessman the GOP calls a “new kind of
Republican.”
Greenlee’s campaign insists this is
their year: The former Boulder mayor has won four at-large
elections in Boulder, and he says population growth has changed the
district’s demographics.
In New Mexico, Tom
Udall, the popular attorney general, is trying to unseat Republican
Bill Redmond while fending off a challenge from the New Mexico
Green Party candidate Carol Miller. The Democratic Party ranks Tom
Udall as among the candidates most likely to beat a GOP incumbent:
He has won endorsements from the League of Conservation Voters and
the Sierra Club and he’s running on a strong civil rights record.
He supports buying the Baca Ranch – 95,000 acres almost completely
surrounded by the Santa Fe National Forest – and creating a
national park (HCN, 8/3/98). Redmond, who made the League of
Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” list, supports legislation that
would put the land under Forest Service management and open it to
logging and ranching.
Redmond has won Hispanic
support for his work to create a commission to review ancestral
land-grant claims in northern New Mexico. But a poll reported in
early September in the Albuquerque Journal shows Udall still has
the edge: 42 percent of the vote compared with Redmond’s 35 percent
and 8 percent for Miller.
“Dustin
Solberg
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A familiar name returns to Western politics.
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