What the Hell Is Going on in Colorado?
Out in Colorado, incumbent Democratic Senator Michael Bennet was supposed to be one of the more endangered Democratic incumbents this year. However, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll, the man is cruising by 16 points. There is a reason for this. That reason is named Darryl Glenn, and he's the latest indicator of how The Base that the Republicans have cultivated so tenderly over the past 40 years can guarantee equally a primary upset win and a general election blowout loss, especially in presidential election years.
Now, though, to the list contained Sharron Angle and Christive O'Donnell, we can add the name of Darryl Glenn.
In June, to the enormous credit of himself and his staff, Glenn, an obscure county commissioner, won a five-way Republican primary by 13 points. He had virtually no name-recognition and even less money, but Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin both came riding to his rescue. Now, to be sure, the primary itself was a bit of a madhouse, as The Denver Post explains. It involved forgery, ads featuring an exploding toilet, and a cameo appearance by a Great Dane named Duke, who probably has sworn off politics forever. (Good dog!) That is the field out of which Glenn emerged by several lengths.
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Then, people started to notice him, and, yoicks, as ThinkProgress documented. He is wildly anti-choice. He thinks Social Security is like Jim Crow because people "bow to the government and not to God." (Next on CNN: Is Medicare An Offering To Baal? Our panel debates.) He's also a climate denialist, radically anti-equality for his LGBTQ constituents, and he doesn't think the United States military should have to abide by any war crimes standards.
At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, he got a primetime speaking slot and delivered a ragbag of talking points and banal exhortations. Via the Gazette:
Here's the bottom line: American exceptionalism is alive and well. Evil exists. But as God as my witness, this battle has already been fought and won. Believe we can win. Believe we can change things. Believe that together, we can Make America Great Again.
And, again according to The Denver Post, Glenn seems to share with his party's presidential nominee an inability to stop running for the Republican nomination. He is running as a full-tilt Trump Republican, speaking only before friendly audiences and blacklisting any media he doesn't like.
Glenn declined to talk to The Denver Post after the Lakewood event Tuesday. "My press secretary back there will handle all Denver Post questions," he said, repeating the same line four times when asked other questions. Glenn did not explain why he is blacklisting Colorado's largest newspaper, but in an interview Thursday with KFKA talk radio, he appeared to link his decision to the Post's coverage of his conflicting explanations of a 1983 charge for third-degree assault, which was later dropped. "The Denver Post, and quite frankly the people that are covering this, when they flat-out call you a liar, instead of becoming journalists, they become advocates," he said. "I think that's totally unacceptable. So I'm drawing a very bright line.
In the battle for the Senate, the Democrats have their own problems, god knows. (Was it really necessary to run Ted Strickland again in Ohio? I think he first ran against Garfield for the House.) But Colorado was one of the places where the Republicans could have had a shot, if their own damn voters, full to the gills with four decades of I-am-not-a-professional-politician GOP propaganda, hadn't got in the way again.
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