Posted on 03/04/2004 6:52:18 AM PST by BlackRazor
Owens needs reality check for Senate run
By Jim Spencer Denver Post Columnist
As he decides whether to run for the United States Senate to replace Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell, here are four words of advice for Colorado Gov. Bill Owens:
Focus on the family.
The governor remains separated from his wife.
"There has been no change in their status since the announcement was made in September," Owens' press secretary Dan Hopkins said Wednesday afternoon.
A couple of hours earlier, Ted Halaby, the chairman of the Colorado Republican Committee, tried to say that doesn't matter.
"I don't think the separation from his wife will be an issue," Halaby said of a possible Owens candidacy. "This is not like the '60s," when a divorce cost Republican Nelson Rockefeller a chance to run for president.
Unfortunately, broken marriages are "all too frequent" today, Halaby continued.
"It's a new age," he said, "a new time."
Owens' marriage is not broken, just bent. It's hard to see how he can fix things while he's out campaigning at the Chamber of Commerce in Manitou Springs.
Campbell will vacate his Senate seat at the end of the year for health reasons.
A statement praising Campbell's public service was all the governor was going to offer Wednesday, said deputy chief of staff Sean Duffy.
"I have not had a chance to talk to the governor," Halaby said. "The governor would be a strong candidate. The last poll showed him with the support of 65 percent of the people."
He's also one who deserves to be challenged if he runs before getting his personal house in order.
The "new age" where Owens might try for the Senate is the one where he and his party unilaterally proclaim ownership of the moral high ground. The guv loves to issue the conservative battle cry "traditional family values." For years, he has positioned himself as holier than large segments of Colorado's population.
Most recently, Owens declared his support for Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave as she tries to amend the United States Constitution to ban gay marriage.
But Owens has long been about proclaiming that it's his way or the highway in a moral agenda.
Dictating other people's behavior is risky business. Legislating love and relationships so they conform to your definition turns you into a target if you can't realize your own standards.
You can't spend a political career presuming to look in other people's bedrooms and expect them not to look in yours.
So focus on the family, Governor.
Here's hoping you can get your life right before you run.
Here's hoping you don't run if you can't.
Otherwise, get ready to answer for everything.
You're the guy who invited the inquisition.
Any attempt to deflect your family situation as your personal business while your nose is stuck deep in everyone else's morality reeks of hypocrisy.
The sophistry of your claims to "traditional family values" and your self-serving stand on gay marriage made it one.
For your supporters to claim your marital problems no longer matter in your public life shows the very situational ethics that members of the religious right deplore in folks they consider spiritual inferiors.
You can divorce yourself from that difficulty only by making up with your wife or by changing your tune.
You have always courted the moralistic, judgmental wing of your party. It will be interesting to see how folks on the religious right will rationalize their pretension if you run.
More interesting will be the willingness of your Democrat opponent to call you on the issue.
Rutt Bridges, the richest and therefore the most prominent Democratic hopeful, is divorced. His ex-wife showed up to support him when he announced his candidacy.
Bridges said Wednesday that the Senate campaign ought to be more about issues than personalities.
That's good political news for you, Governor. But it hardly excuses you from your own double standard. Nor does it make you less vulnerable on character issues as the campaign progresses.
Campbell's withdrawal makes Colorado's Senate race one of the most important in the country. The Republican majority in the Senate stands at 51-48 with one independent.
Halaby predicted that both major parties will pour big bucks into the state as a result of Campbell's retirement.
"We will be targeted for that seat," Halaby said. "There are a lot of ramifications."
Those ramifications may depend on whether voters choose to hold a moral arbiter to his actions or to his words.
Clearly the point of the columnist. I don't want an evil conservative in the senate, and I know you'd win if you ran, so you better not run, and if you do, I'll attack the hell out of you, particularly your family.
And John Kerry, who is divorced, supports amending Massachusetts' Constitution to ban gay marriage.
Double standard.
LOL. I was thinking the same thing.
The party of skank -- the teen pro-aborts, pro-child sex, pro-homo, pro-NOW hags people are trying to take a higher moral ground? Po-leese!
A left wing homosexual being interviewed about homosexual marriage on FOX actually claimed heterosexual polygamy and incest are immoral and illegal!!! No joke! He thought he was more moral then them, and had a right to marry where they didn't! No kidding!
The left wingers are going totally insane. They've seriously gone over the edge. They've fallen head first in the lake of hells fire. Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
This notion that having certain standards and not meeting them personally disqualifies you for public office, well, if we were not permitted to aim high despite our personal faults and limitations, we'd all still be living in caves.
Being a skanky gigolo is more moral than a man with a disagreement - to loonie lefties, anyway.
We really need to coin a term for that, since they're doing it all over the country, i.e., Kerry saying he will stand up to the "Bush attack machine" before anybody has said one word about him.
It's like false bravado -- along the lines of a preemptive strike, IMO.
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