Littwin: Beauprez campaign getting it all wrong

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 16, 2006 at midnight

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The good news in the Beauprez campaign is that no one has accused the congressman of stabbing the UNC punter.

The bad news is everything else.

You've seen the Rocky poll that has Bill Ritter leading Bob Beauprez by 17 points. That's a hard number to believe, even though it comes from a respected Republican pollster.

But all you have to believe - and you didn't need a poll to know this - is that Beauprez is running the worst possible campaign not involving a snowy march on Moscow.

This is how bad it is: Scott McInnis, the former congressman who considered running for governor himself, has now compared Beauprez's campaign staff to "putting a high school quarterback on the Denver Broncos and having him start the game."

Sound like a little Republican road rage to you?

Look, even if the poll is off by as much as 50 percent, that still means, according to my math, Beauprez is getting clobbered. And according to what I know of Colorado politics, it is virtually impossible for a generic-style Republican to lose to a generic-type Democrat by anything remotely close to that kind of number. You'd think Beauprez was involved in a scandal - and not just in a scandalously run campaign.

In fact, Beauprez is an inside-politics, just-folks, Republican's Republican who used to leave the bank and - I'm guessing - head off to the country club to tell the boys over a few cold ones about his days milking cows before he bulldozed the farm. It's this Beauprez who is getting clobbered.

You don't have to ask what he's doing wrong. The short answer is: everything. Yes, he comes out for raising college tuition - after the governor fought to keep it in check. Yes, he comes out for replacing the state gas tax with a higher sales tax - so little old ladies can generously help pay for those Lincoln Navigators.

And - yes, yes, my God, yes - then there's his idea to "train elk" to walk around oil and gas sites. You can't make this up. Some are now calling him the "elk whisperer." When will Ritter supporters start showing up at Beauprez rallies in elk hats, asking Beauprez, "Which way, Bob?"

It isn't just the gaffes that are hurting Beauprez. And it isn't just Iraq. And it isn't just wedge-issue fatigue, although that's clearly hurting Republicans. Why do you think they lost the legislature?

If there is anything that's hurting Beauprez, it's Beauprez himself. For instance, he picks a lieutenant governor who compares gay marriage to marrying sheep. And if you're wondering how picking a West Sloper has worked, well, the Montrose and Grand Junction newspapers have endorsed Ritter, who is firmly in the sheep-to-sheep camp.

And if it's a bad climate for Republicans across the country, that doesn't explain the chill in Colorado. Why, for example, can't Beauprez say something nice - just one thing - about the man he's trying to replace?

Bill Owens is his most important backer. And yet, in one interview, Beauprez rips Owens' management style. In an interview with the Rocky editorial board, he admits Owens has done "some very good things." Some very good things? That puts him some distance ahead of the Beauprez campaign.

The conventional wisdom is that everything started to go wrong for Beauprez at the beginning, during the primary season when he came out against Ref C.

That's when Marc Holtzman nicknamed him Both Ways Bob. And it's been all one way since.

Beauprez could never kick the nickname. And he's never gotten voters to warm up to him. According to the Rocky poll, voters don't know Beauprez very well - but 40 percent apparently think they know him well enough not to like him.

The reason Both Ways Bob stuck is not that he's a notorious flip-flopper. Come on, he is a politician. It stuck because he took a Ref C stand that was so transparently political that no one, from either side, believed him.

A prominent Republican recently complained to me that Beauprez has given voters no reason to vote for him. I can't even name an issue in this campaign. One side is for accountability. The other is for responsibility. Get your ballots now.

What Ritter wants is another vote on Ref C. He's getting it. For Beauprez, he gets it from supporters and opponents. It's lose-lose for Beauprez - and maybe by 17 percentage points.

Beauprez, meanwhile, has spent nearly half a million dollars attacking Ritter's record as a DA. In Beauprez's world, we're living in a Denver landscape out of Escape from New York. Maybe he should come to town more often from far-away Arvada. Or at least look at the real estate prices. People are dying to live in Denver - not dying from living in Denver.

Of course, Ritter is vulnerable on illegal immigration. But Beauprez is even blowing this issue, not that it's entirely his fault. Every time Owens says Colorado has passed the toughest immigration law in the country, he's singing the praises of himself, but also the Democratic legislature.

But then there's Part II, which is Beauprez's "plan." He says he "plans" to lead a delegation of governors to Washington to lobby congressmen like, uh, himself to pass tougher illegal-immigration legislation. I'm serious. This is is what we call a hanging curveball. And Ritter, swinging hard, says, Why doesn't Beauprez simply lead a delegation down the hall?

This campaign isn't over, of course. We will see, I promise, a Willie Horton moment, in which Beauprez tells us of a Ritter plea bargain involving an illegal immigrant who has committed some horrible crime. It will damage Ritter, at least briefly.

But then, in the end, the Beauprez campaign will still be stuck with the Beauprez campaign.

Seventeen points behind in the fourth quarter - and it's too late to punt. Maybe if John Elway had run.

littwinm@rockymountainnews.com.

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