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January 04, 2016 01:58 PM UTC

Top Ten Stories of 2015 #7: Cory Gardner Makes Liars Of Everybody

  • 24 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
Sen. Cory Gardner.
Sen. Cory Gardner.

By far the biggest defeat suffered by Colorado Democrats in 2014–and arguably the biggest loss for Democrats in this state since retaking control of the state legislature in 2004 and starting their roll toward political dominance here–was the narrow election of Cory Gardner to the U.S. Senate. Gardner’s defeat of Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Udall was a major reversal of fortune for Colorado Democrats after a string of victories both in line and in defiance of national political trends of recent years.

But in 2015, Gardner showed that his victory would come at a very high cost for his fellow Colorado Republicans, and a local press and pundit establishment that squandered enormous credibility on Gardner’s election. Since taking office a year ago, Sen. Gardner has swiftly proven his critics right on a range of issues that were key to his successful Senate campaign. At the same time he proved that his defenders on the campaign trail in 2014 were absolutely wrong, to the point of being complicit in a major deception that is now plain for all to see.

And that’s going to be a problem next time they have to sell someone like Cory Gardner.

When Gardner entered the U.S. Senate race in the spring of 2014, his first public act was to announce that he was no longer a supporter of the “Personhood” abortion bans that had repeatedly failed in statewide votes as ballot initiatives. Gardner was on the record steadfastly supporting these initiatives before they became a symbol of Republican backwardness on the issue, and his decision to walk back his prior strident opposition to abortion was obviously calculated and timed.

And it worked. Democrats, convinced they had Gardner pinned, pressed the attack single-mindedly over Gardner’s flip-flop, certain that he wouldn’t survive the contradiction. But not only did Gardner survive, he successfully turned Democratic fury over this shameless political dodge into an asset. Everyone knew Gardner was lying about his “change of heart,” as evidenced by his continued support for a functionally equivalent abortion ban at the federal level called the Life at Conception Act. But Gardner’s campaign brilliantly succeeded at turning Democratic frustration over their inability to “get Gardner” into a Moby Dick-style obsession in the eyes of the pundits.  Supposedly impartial journalists took up Gardner’s rejoinder “Mark Uterus,” freely broadcasting the new conventional wisdom that Udall’s attacks on Gardner over abortion had become a “tedious refrain.”

But history didn’t end with Gardner’s narrow victory over Sen. Udall. The insistence from the media and pundit class that Gardner “would post no threat to abortion rights” was immediately put to the test in 2015, and Gardner failed that test. In retrospect this should not have been a surprise, but Gardner’s repeated votes in favor of new abortion restrictions as a freshman U.S. Senator–especially in the context of the GOP’s year-long grandstand against Planned Parenthood last year–made liars of Gardner’s mainstream media defenders from 2014. After weeks of debunked hidden-camera video footage, investigation after fruitless investigation of Planned Parenthood by the federal and state level, and then the domestic terror attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs…how can anyone read what the pundits said about this issue in 2014 with a straight face?

Folks, not only were the pundits wrong about Gardner, they helped him pull off a sweeping deception of the people of Colorado. The damage to the credibility of outlets like the Denver Post who endorsed Gardner in defiance of all of their own stated values is easy to understand, and it is not being forgotten as they surely must have hoped. Such provable deception as Gardner’s campaign and subsequent actions as Senator does not simply become part of the background noise of public cynicism. It harms institutions we rely on as a society. It breeds contempt for our political system, and a sense of hopelessness that reduces participation. We know many Democrats were and remain eager to lay Gardner’s victory at the feet of his opponent, but what happened was bigger than Mark Udall.

It took a village to give us Cory Gardner.

Perhaps the only upshot in a story no one should be proud of is this: after the exasperated insistence from Colorado’s pundit class that Gardner would not be exactly what he turned out to be, voters will be less inclined to listen to them next time.

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24 thoughts on “Top Ten Stories of 2015 #7: Cory Gardner Makes Liars Of Everybody”

  1. Backbone radio was trashing Gardner the other day. Maybe he'll end up being deemed not conservative enough by the Tea Party/Hate Radio crowd who are more hateful by the day. (Paging Quentin Tarantino!) There seems to be no end to the slime that these radio guys can dish and station owners almost surely care about only one thing more than right wing politics, and that's money.

    1. Cory Gardner is smarter than them and you. I can't wait to read the sour grapes on this blog when he wins reelection, assuming Colorado Pols even exists by then…

      2. You're right; he's much smarter than me: he's figured out how to make $170K a year while doing almost no real work while being portrayed as a shiny smiled public servant whose public is the richest of the rich and morons like you. 

      3. You're right; he's much smarter than me: he's figured out how to make $170K a year while doing almost no real work while being portrayed as a shiny smiled public servant whose public is the richest of the rich and morons like you. 

    2. Read his Facebook page; it's full of wingers complaining about wasting their vote on such an Obama-hugging RINO, voting for Omnibus, not pushing for Obamacare repeal. The impeachment crowd are pissed.  They think Senator Cory-Boy was sent to Washington to torch the place, not do the people's (Kochs that is) business.

  2. Colorado Pols writes: "Sen. Gardner has swiftly proven his critics right on a range of issues….."  What exactly is that range?? All I see is discussion about abortion and personhood. Maybe you could add to that "range?" 

    Senator Gardner has been decent on some conservation/public lands issues; something for which Colorado Pols apparently doesn't want to give him credit. He was a strong supporter of re-authorization of the Land & Water Conservation Fund throughout his first year. Early in 2015, he was the only Western Republican senator to vote against the non-binding Murkowski amendment calling upon the feds to relinquish the public lands to the states. Among others.    C.H.B.

    1. ColPols has made way more out of Corey's supposedly shocking hypocrisy that supposedly fooled people into voting for him (few were shocked or fooled, the win wasn't all that narrow and Udall's campaign was a disaster) than anyone else has. It's like a bone ColPols just isn't going to give up. This happens occasionally, sometimes in the form of outlandishly biased Big Line ratings but we forgive them because they are, in general, pretty sensible and accurate.

      So what if rightie wackos are having buyers remorse? They wouldn't have voted for a Dem instead.  He proved pretty appealing to the middle which is where Senate races are won in Colorado. Senate races for any individual Senator coming only every six years it seems pretty pointless for anybody on either side to be puffing their chests out over whether he's going to be a winner or a loser in his next one.

      Udall's blowing it should be inserted into this spot on the list, if you ask me. 

      1. Not to interrupt your Stockholm Syndrome or whateverthefuck, but Gardner won by less than 2% of the vote. Less than 40,000 votes out of almost 2 million cast. That is in fact a very narrow win, not much bigger than Bennet's win in 2010. Why do you keep misrepresenting this number? It was a very close race in a wave year that could have gone either way.

        You seem to really get your jollies off telling everyone how bad Udall sucked, and in doing so you help cover for Gardner's lies. You're just as bad as Lynn Bartels herself and I'm sick of hearing it. If you think Pols is a broken record, listen to yourself, and you're supposed to be a Democrat?

        Also, Udall lost in 2014. Gardner was proven a liar in 2015. This is a list of 2015 stories.

        Sorry to be rude, but with friends like these…

         

        1. Whatever. ColPols was going on about Gardner being an untrustworthy liar all through the campaign and Udall's polls consistently showed him behind long before election day.  2% in a statewide is actually not considered hair’s breath either.  

          If fantasizing that Udall's crappy clueless campaign could have been victorious if only Gardner hadn't lied makes you fell better … go ahead. I was canvassing for that election and I and every volunteer I worked with knew that Udall was going to lose, not because we all had Stockholm Syndrome but because we were out there talking to people and it wasn't pretty, because he hadn't had any lead in the polls for ages and we knew from experience all the happy talk about being within the margin of error was just that.  No matter how close, if the lead doesn't at least go back and forth the the one who's consistantly that close but no cigar almost always loses.

          And the people we were talking to toward the end, middle of the road persuadables, were not saying they were going to vote for Gardner because they were reassured that he was moderate on choice. They didn't much care about that. They were telling us they weren't going to vote for Udall because he seemed like nothing but a pro-abortion extemist who didn't care about their concerns.  

          Frankly I don't understand why some Dems find imagining us to be victims of those clever R liars so appealing. Much more useful to realize where we screwed up and figured out how to fix it than to wallow in victimhood. But that's just me, dear, old Stockholm Syndrome BlueCat.

           

           

      2. BlueCat, I agree with you, although I would cut Udall a little more slack than you. Since 1978, when Bill Armstrong was elected, Colorado has had one Senator from each party.  The only exemptions are when Nighthorse Campell switched parties and was reelected, ('95 – '05), and when Udall and Bennet were in office at the same time. There have been 13 US Senate elections in Colorado since 1978.  In 10 of them, the winner was the opposite party of the "other Senator."  The exceptions were Allard winning in '96, when Nighthorse Cambell was in office, Campbell winning in '98, as a Republican, when Allard was in office, and Udall winning in '08, when Salazar was in office.  As you point out, Senate races in Colorado are won from the middle, but low information voters also like split senatorial representation in Colorado.  That is hardly Udall's fault.

        1. Sorry but his loss was definitely his team's fault.  I was at campaign events where local boots on the ground volunteers tried to tell them what we were seeing out there and we were ignored. Just bumpkins who needed to leave it to the professional (out of state) ops.  We were told over and over that the election lay with the women's vote (correct) and that's why it was so important to keep hammering away at choice (not so correct).

          Never occurred to them that Colorado women might actually care even more about the economy, jobs and all the things that effect quality of life and the future of their families or that many Colorado women, even pro-choice Democratic ones, actually have some pretty ambivalent feelings about abortion. It's certainly not the one and only issue for most. And it certainly never occured to them to listen to us, the people going door to door and talking to voters outside the bubble of enthusiastc partisan supporters, when we tried to tell them. It was there's to lose and they lost. By the last couple of weeks anyone but the hopelessly optimistic could see it was all over.

          Not to be harsh but there it is. I like Udall and in person he's very charming, just the kind of outdoors enthusiast, fourteener summiting guy Coloradans find easy to like. They used none of that in his scowling, scolding ads. It was a real shame. It didn't have to happen.

          2. BC I agree with almost all of your points about the Udall campaign and I would add this which I believe Senator Bennet hopefully knows and is acting upon. A candidate must do three things during an election campaign. First, the candidate must introduce themselves to the public. Second, the candidate must draw a contrast between what they have done or stand for and their opposition. Third, a candidate must tell the electorate why they should be elected (what's the future look like).

            By sticking almost solely to the abortion/choice issues, Senator Udall's campaign failed on all three counts for the following reasons. First, with the hundreds of thousands of new people in Colorado by 2014, there were many who didn't know or have any idea who Senator Udall was, or what he stood for. His campaign never introduced him to those people. Second, the only contrast he drew between himself and Senator Gardner was on the abortion/choice issues. There were plenty of other issue to use against his opponent but he became singled minded and somewhat shrill. Third, the Udall campaign never told any of us why he should be elected. He never gave us an outline for the future.

  3. Gardner is awful of course…. Udall was definitely better but also betrayed progressives in the democratic party…. Why he lost. Udall was much better than Bennet who has betrayed progressives, twisted the knife and shot us a few times….. We will lose Bennet's seat in my opinion. The only chance he has is that it is a presidential year and there may be enough that don't know his betrayals that he keeps the seat. But I doubt it. I will not vote for him again, I still can't get rid of the stink I got from my last vote for him. Don't want to see a republican in the seat, why I won't support Bennet. My Democratic party has asked me to support a right wing republican…. I won't.

      1. I agree with your comment about "Senator Neville." Some individuals can only vote for politicians who are Ivory Soap pure on all of their personal interests and issues. News flash for Denise: political issues seldom come in absolute black and white. They come in shades of gray.

          1. And wait for the perfect candidate who never compromises and never behaves like a politician but still somehow manages to win political elections and then get stuff done. They should only have to wait until after unicorns climb down every rainbow to poop gold bricks for each and every one of us, after which all the children will hold hands and sing songs of peace that will inspire all militants to lay down their arms and hug their erstwhile enemies. And of course Tiny Tim will throw away his crutch and bless us, every one.

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