In Colorado, we just endured
the most expensive U.S. Senate campaign in our state’s history,
with about $15 million spent to determine who would replace
retiring Republican Ben Campbell, who was first elected as a
Democrat in 1992. He changed parties in 1995, and easily won
re-election as a Republican in 1998.
There was more mud
than you’d find after a downpour during a tractor-pull, and
national groups bought incessant negative advertising which
demonstrated that one guy was a pawn of the evil trial lawyers,
while the other enjoyed poisoning innocent fish.
But
there was one nasty Colorado campaign tradition that neither side
practiced. It’s the mountain version of “Playing the Race Card,”
and I call it “Playing the Geography Card.”
Basically, it
means ignoring everything about a political issue, except location.
That is, never mind if it’s a good proposal or a bad one. Don’t
consider its merits or shortcomings. Just consider the source.
One skilled Geography Card player was Rep. Scott McInnis,
a Grand Junction Republican who stepped aside this year after
serving six terms in Congress. He represented Colorado’s 3rd
Congressional District — essentially, the western half of the
state.
Every so often, the representative from Colorado’s
1st District — Democrat Diana DeGette of Denver — would
propose wilderness designation for some tract in McInnis’ district.
As befits a rural Republican, McInnis opposed her
suggestions. But he did not respond by pointing out that a given
parcel didn’t have wilderness characteristics, or that there were
more suitable areas, or that wilderness designation might interfere
with his constituents’ livelihoods, or even that he opposed
wilderness on principle.
Instead, he played the Geography
Card; DeGette was from Denver, and therefore anything she had to
say about the rest of Colorado should be ignored solely on that
account. (Note, though, that McInnis never had trouble accepting
campaign contributions from Denver residents, or even from outfits
like the Florida Sugar Cane League and the Texas Cattle Feeders
Association; geographic purity does have its limits.)
This year the Card appeared in the 4th Congressional District
(northeastern Colorado), where supporters of Republican incumbent
Marilyn Musgrave ran TV ads to warn voters that her Democratic
opponent was getting aid and comfort from “rich radical liberals in
Denver and Boulder,” while Musgrave was standing firm to defend
“Colorado values.” (Musgrave opponents ran their own outrageous ads
that won’t be forgotten for a long time; they featured a lady
in a pink suit dunking a family in a tank of toxic waste, among
other dramatizations.)
But Coors and Salazar couldn’t
play the Geography Card against each other, since both come from
families that were established in Colorado before it became a state
in 1876. Coors came from a German immigrant family, Salazar from
farmers in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado — two
ethnic lines recognized in the original Colorado Constitution,
which established the state with three official languages: English,
German and Spanish.
German was the only language that
20-year-old Adolf Coors knew when he dodged the Prussian draft in
1868 and stowed away on a ship bound for America. He made his way
west, and started his namesake brewery in Golden in 1873. Pete
Coors, the Republican Senate candidate, is his great-grandson.
The Salazars trace back to 1714, when one Antonio de
Salazar petitioned the Spanish colonial government for land near
Espanola, N.M. Led by Ken Salazar’s great-great-grandfather,
Francisco Esteban de Salazar, the family moved north to present
Colorado in the 1850s, and they have been tilling the soil in the
Rincones area (near Manassa in the San Luis Valley) ever since.
Both families suffered from Colorado bigotry and
discrimination. Anglo oppression of Hispanics might have peaked
during the Depression when Colorado Gov. Ed Johnson sent the
National Guard to the New Mexico border to keep people out of
Colorado. The anti-German bigotry came during World War I,
accompanied by Prohibition — which was partly an effort to
purge America of “foreign” influences like Teutonic beer. Coors
survived it only by turning to malted milk and porcelain for the
duration.
Neither candidate could call the other a
carpetbagger, so Coloradans had the rare pleasure of a campaign
that focused on policies, rather than the Geography Card. And in
the end, we picked a mild-mannered centrist Democrat, rather than
an affable but intense Republican business-owner. Good things can
happen when we take the Geography Card out of the deck.
Ed Quillen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
publishes Colorado Central and writes columns in
Salida, Colorado.
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