Two stories in the last 24 hours help explain why GOP U.S. Senate candidate Darryl Glenn faces an historic drubbing at the polls in November, likely faring much worse than Donald Trump at the top of Colorado’s ballot. As the Durango Herald’s Peter Marcus reports:
In a Dec. 12, 2015 talk show interview – which recently garnered attention after flying under the radar early in the campaign – Glenn said he generally supports a proposal by Republican Donald Trump to prohibit all Muslims from entering the United States…
Glenn is sticking to his comments, even as the Trump campaign seemed to walk the proposal back on Thursday, with running mate Mike Pence of Indiana saying that Trump no longer wanted to enact a ban on Muslim travel.
Asked on CNN about why he would not condemn the proposal, Pence said, “Because that’s not Donald Trump’s position now.”
That’s right, folks–even as Donald Trump runs away from his infamous call for a “shutdown” of Muslim travel to the United States, Darryl Glenn is doubling down. That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what candidates are supposed to do transitioning from the primary to the general election. But Darryl Glenn is not your average candidate. He’s much less than average, and weeks behind the “Etch-a-Sketch” curve.
“Islam and the Constitution are in clear conflict,” Glenn opined. [Pols emphasis]
Meanwhile, a Colorado Public Radio story follows up on another ugly sound bite from Glenn’s not-too-distant past that made national news this week–comments from Glenn last year suggesting that he considers pregnancies, no matter how they came about, a “gift from God.” In contrast to his views on Muslims, it does appear that Glenn wants to tone down the abortion rhetoric:
“I am 100 percent pro-life and believe life begins at conception. Women should have access to birth control. I would, however, be willing to support legal exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother,” Glenn said, in part.
The statement appears to be in conflict with Glenn’s past statements to conservative organizations.
In a June 2016 post on its website, Colorado Right to Life says based a candidate survey answered by Glenn, he “pledged to be 100% pro-life.” On the same page, Colorado Right to Life states, “no candidate who supports abortion for any reason is ‘pro-life.'”
In this case, it seems like Glenn is trying to take a cue from Cory Gardner’s 2014 U.S. Senate campaign, in which Gardner deliberately flip-flopped on the “Personhood” abortion ban amendments at the start of his campaign. The trouble is that Glenn has nowhere near the personal charisma that Gardner had to live that down, and is starting from a huge deficit instead of angling for leverage in a tight race. With abortion as an issue not factoring in this election as strongly as 2014, Glenn gains little by backing off his formerly hard-line stand–but still has plenty to lose from upsetting the religious right voters in his dwindling coalition.
We are of course only talking about matters of degree here, since virtually no one expects Glenn to even come close to winning this race. But if it was ever Glenn’s intention to at least minimize his losses by not saying politically unwise things, he’s blown it.
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Do you think that Mr. Glenn ever served with a Muslim and considered how their religion was in clear conflict with the Constitution? Or that he might have met with someone from The Islamic Society of Colorado Springs and asked them about how their faith conflicts with the Constitution?
Fortunately, we have a short period of time left before Mr. Glenn returns to his locality rather than being a candidate for the Senate. But once he is there, I hope someone will take the time to ask him how all the current soldiers and citizens of the Islamic faith have somehow been willing to falsely swear to their willingness to "support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic."