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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
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40%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
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(R) Sheri Davis
40%
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(D) Brianna Titone
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(D) Jerry DiTullio
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CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
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CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
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(R) Jeff Crank*
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CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
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CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
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CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
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State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
June 10, 2018 04:49 PM UTC
15 Comments
Cute interview with Polis. No big reveals, but it does give a flavor of who he is – a smart and innovative guy who has been legislating a long time ( 5 terms!!??), has big ideas, but also a record of helping to make big ideas into reality.
A gay man whose personal life is just another unremarkable factoid. I wonder what the publicity family portraits will look like if he's elected in the general. Here's one from The Advocate:
The right wing will freak the f**k out if/when he and his family move into the Governor's Mansion. I can see the right wing media headlines now: Colorado State Flag to be Replaced by Rainbow Flag! Mandatory Sex Re-education Camps for Erring Legislators!
I wish you had taken some time to drill down into Polis' plans for renewable energy, Medicare for All, and universal pre-K. Otherwise conservatives complain that he's just a pie-in-the-sky leftie with no practical way to make "free stuff" happen. He has in fact helped make some improbable things happen: a network of public charter schools for kids who would otherwise drop out, a billion dollar cannabis industry in Colorado, supported Colorado's pioneering renewable energy standard, introduced legislation to export clean energy nationally. A lot of what has made Colorado the #1 economy in the country has come from initiatives that Polis backed.
Audio quality was sketchy, or maybe it was just my equipment.
Why are we so prone to thinking that a new leader or culture means there's only room for one point of view? Leaving aside that the right-wing really would do such things in power, everyone seems to think a change in culture means all-or-nothing-ness, that optional things become mandatory things.
Is that an American thing? Or all over the world?
Americans are uniquely good at turning nice-to-haves into must-haves, through the power of peer pressure. I don't think we'll get over our collective paranoia until we learn to stop doing that.
Thoughtful questions, Lucy. I believe that our collective paranoia about how a change in cultural norms means that all previous norms and traditions would be erased, that "zero-sum game", comes from a knowledge of our own American history.
We have always been hypocrites; preaching about how America would create freedom of religion and a land without tyranny, while burning "witches", and enslaving "pagans " in the name of converting them to Christianity, and importing millions of Africans to work and die in slavery to build up the "land of the free".
So we know that this is what we do; we erase other people's history, degrade their lives, and and justify it by calling them subhuman. Meanwhile, we tear up at the Star Spangled Banner and erect a Statue of Liberty calling for the world's refugees to come here for safety.
At least, that is what we have often done. The tension between our lived history and our ideals of freedom, tolerance, democracy, and the constant attempt to make our ideals live, is what perhaps "makes America great". Again.
The U.S. is imperfect. We're all imperfect. A society of human beings of course is going to get a lot of it wrong, sometimes purposefully, often times inadvertently.
But this country does strive to be better. It does strive to get it right. And over time we've improved – a lot.
Yes keep fighting to be better. But do realize that long term we are an amazing accomplishment in the history of civilization.
No nation led by Donald Trump can claim to be part of the history of civilisation.
Without Trump, no women's march, no #metoo movement. Without Trump, no appreciation of our free press and free elections, imperfect as they are. Dialectics.
That's what I've been thinking, M.J. The Gen-Xers were either incredibly fortunate or incredibly lazy. I don't remember anything they had to protest or fear the loss of. The Millenials seem much more like their parents (the Boomers). They see the world going to pieces and they're in the streets trying to stop the destruction.
Pew research says that Gen X is between 1965 and 1980. That's more you than I – I'm a Boomer. But I remember those GenX years as coming of age as an activist – I started young, getting thrown off the Air Force base at 14 for protesting with an anti-war group.
The birth of the Chicano movement in Denver, anti-nuke activists surrounding Rocky Flats, marches for abortion, women's movement in all its forms, and globally, liberation struggles in Nicaragua, all over Central and South America, South Africa. The very beginnings of talk about climate change, which we used to call the Greenhouse Effect.
There was plenty to protest, plenty to fear in that time – all the pieces were coming together. It was also the end of the belief that some "ism" was going to save us – that socialism or communism had some kind of answers. And we still had the peace and love vibe from the 60s, in conflict with militance from all over. .
A dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship, we found, or at least I did, after I got burned trying to work with some Trotskyists. Democracy triumphed. Solidarnosc. Chernobyl. The Soviet Union fell.
I guess I see it as more of a continuum from the Boomers to the millenials – loss of innocence, making connections, questioning, pushing the envelope.
So yes, in some sense, the millenials are returning to the early Boomer activist traditions – I see it in many of the grassroots groups like Indivisible – young people and old people share leadership and hard-won wisdom.
It will be their world. They should fight for it. We'll help as long as we can.
I'm actually (strictly reckoning by those dates) supposed to be a Gen-Xer myself. But I've never thought of myself as one. I was the baby, by half a generation, in a houseful of Boomers. When people my age were playing Jack and Jill records on their Close-n-Plays, we had the Beatles and the Stones blasting from my parents' console stereo. I was always out of synch with my peers. So off by a year or not, I'm a Boomer.
I remember all those things you mentioned and I was at the encirclement of Rocky Flats.
I thought a lot of people backed those initiatives. Who knew that Polis and Polis alone was responsible for all that stuff?
Nobody "knew" that. I wrote:
And on the seventh day, he rested.
Actually he rested on the 6th day – he's that good 🙂
Face it — he's got two young kids. He doesn't get any rest!