Rosen: Coors a straight shooter
October 29, 2004 - Rocky Mountain News
The Coors-Salazar Senate race is a tossup. It's been hotly contested and has attracted national attention, as majority party control of the U.S. Senate might hang in the balance.
In spite of their political differences, the candidates themselves have been admirably civil with each other. That's because they're both soft-spoken nice guys. Forget the negative TV and radio adds on both sides. It's the nature of that genre that most broadcast messages are exaggerated, misleading and self-serving.
Neither man has a voting record on issues of national or local policy. Pete Coors, obviously, has spent his career in the private sector. Ken Salazar, with 18 years in various state government positions, has never been a legislator and, as such, has never cast a vote. Some of Salazar's Democratic supporters argue that the U.S. Senate is too big a first step for someone like Coors who's never held political office. Strangely, that didn't appear to bother these same people when Gary Hart, John Corzine (the millionaire Wall Street bond trader who spent a fortune to become a Democrat Senator from New Jersey in 2000) and Hillary Clinton did it. The $64 question for Colorado voters is how would Coors or Salazar vote in Washington?
There's no doubt about Coors. He's a mainstream conservative Republican (these are the kind of people lefties brand as "ultra-conservative, right-wing extremists"). Coors hasn't hedged on any positions in this campaign. He's strong on national defense, favors limited government spending and taxes, a balanced approach to environmental policy, individual rights and responsibilities, economic policies supportive of private enterprise and capital formation, and he believes in traditional American values. His voting record would resemble that of Hank Brown and Bill Armstrong.
Salazar is another story. He's a Democrat. And if he goes to Washington, he'll vote like a Democrat, like Gary Hart and Tim Wirth who racked up decidedly liberal ratings while they were in the Senate. Now, Colorado isn't the People's Republic of Massachusetts (the only state won by George McGovern in 1972), where senators can be unabashedly liberal. In Colorado, Democrats running for statewide office have to pretend to be "moderate." Hart and Wirth played that game and so did Roy Romer. It's why Pat Schroeder never ran for statewide office. She knew she couldn't pass herself off as a centrist and couldn't be elected as a liberal.
Predictably, Salazar is campaigning as a moderate, even running to the right of Coors on capital punishment. But campaigning is one thing, voting is another. Here's a clue: Salazar's brother, John, has a voting record. The Colorado Union of Taxpayers rates him 64th out of 65, the second worst record in the Colorado House. He may not be his brother's keeper, but I've never heard Ken call John too liberal.
Rest assured, as a rookie senator seeking to win favor with the Democrat leadership and vying for good committee assignments, Salazar would toe the party line. Like almost all Democrats (there have been a few exceptions in the South), he'd support organized labor and its agenda. He'd dance to the tune of the teachers' unions. He'd pander to feminists, gays and minority activists. He'd play the Democrats' age-old politics-of-envy game, pledging to raise taxes on the "rich" (he already has). He'd march in step with enviro-zealots (the League of Conservation Voters has kicked in $750,000 to bankroll TV ads for his campaign). Even though his campaign strategy is to position himself as a moderate, Salazar has already hedged on some pointed questions in debates. On KUSA-Channel 9, when asked if Colorado should recognize same-sex civil unions, Coors said "no," and Salazar copped out, saying it's an "area to be explored." When asked about Amendment 34, a fabrication of plaintiffs attorneys to make it more profitable to sue homebuilders and contractors in Colorado, Coors said "no," and Salazar, ever the lawyer, said he was "undecided."
It's instructive to note that Coors and Salazar are contending for the Senate seat being vacated by Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Campbell, always a free spirit, was a relatively conservative Democrat. As his party moved relentlessly to the left, Campbell switched parties and became a moderate Republican. Salazar is still a Democrat. My case rests. Vote for Pete Coors. A levelheaded businessman's perspective is in all-too-short supply in the chambers of Congress. |
