Gentlemen, before you is an opportunity and a choice that each of you must make.
For Michael Bennet and Joe O’Dea, the major party candidates in the US Senate race in Colorado, the upcoming campaign offers an opportunity to model a different, improved way of politics and begin the slow rebuilding of our badly damaged, often unbearable process.
To be clear, this will be a tough campaign. As it should be. Politics is not sloppy, and seats in the Senate are rare and coveted.
Between Bennet and O’Dea, one will vote for Chuck Schumer to lead the Senate; others are likely to pick Mitch McConnell. One will vote to confirm most of Biden’s nominees; others will look more skeptically, distrustfully. Their political differences are real, and their areas of focus also differ.
Contrary to recent expectations, this race could be quite competitive. Colorado’s Democratic advantage, two decades in the making, could be offset by a potential Republican wave that shows signs of spreading from coast to coast.
It was difficult for Bennet to run in difficult years for his party. He ran for the first time in the 2010 elections after being appointed to a vacant seat in the Senate. It was the first off-season of Obama’s presidency in which Democrats lost 63 seats in Congress and seven in the Senate. Deletion, sure, by any measure. Bennet survived narrowly when the Republicans rejected their better primary choice in favor of Ken Buck, now Congressman Buck, who helped Bennet’s cause with a few unforced errors.
Bennet was next in 2016, the year of Trump’s stunning upset nationally, even as Democrats weathered the storm in Colorado. Again, the GOP’s choice of an underequipped, underfunded, no-hope challenger helped him.
Which brings us to the present time and what could prove to be Bennet’s toughest battle in yet another volatile political context.
O’Dea is everything that Bennet’s previous two opponents were not. He is a political outsider, having never run for anything before, much like Bennet when he first took office. O’Dea is neither doctrinaire nor extreme in his ideology. He is surprisingly moderate on the issue of women’s reproductive rights, an advantage in a country where that is the dominant opinion. He is anything but a Trump figure in a state where that affinity or brand means political death.
A year or two ago, if you had picked O’Dea as the eventual Republican nominee, you would have won a prize for political forecasting. He appeared outside the list of usual suspects.
Yet here we are: Bennet vs. O’Dea.
Every incentive will be for each of them to run a standard, sharp campaign. Plenty of consultants will advise such a course. Well-paid opposition researchers will dig deep to find the raw material – “oppo” in business parlance.
If you want to bet where we’re headed, put your money on that tried and tired path.
But what if these two honorable, reasonable, decent men decided to break the mold? Or even tinker with it a bit?
What if everyone decided to use the campaign to enlighten and inspire instead of humiliate and destroy?
Besides the two or three traditional televised debates, what if Bennet and O’Dea did a series of less formal meetings in town halls across the state? Imagine a school hall in Pueblo or Glenwood Springs filled with hundreds of concerned, engaged citizens asking real, honest questions of both candidates, while the partisans are weeded out along with the trash.
What if everyone ditched the mean, vapid 30 second attack ads based on the “oppo” deep dive? Let Colorado show that democracy can work without such garbage on the airwaves or in our mailboxes.
You know the ads. “Joe O’Dea’s construction company is 24 hours late filing a response to a 2003 OSHA complaint. Is this the callous, irresponsible leadership we want in the Senate?”
Or, “Michael Bennet voted in committee for an amendment that secretly helped his wife’s second cousin’s neighbor. It is time to root out such high-level corruption.”
Okay, both examples are fictional. But both are too convincing and representative of the fare that pollutes our television screens every election cycle.
Of course, even if both candidates rose to the occasion, there’s the problem of the multitude of “independent expenditure” committees and related 527 operations (named after a provision in the federal tax code) that fall with little responsibility for doing the real dirty work of modern campaigns.
These creations are mostly a byproduct of misnamed, ill-advised “campaign finance reforms” that mostly served to constrain candidates with the vast sums of money now funneled into these outside operations with far less transparency. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision certainly didn’t help either.
The attractive force of the political status quo is strong. Campaigns, launched by a huge, independent, permanent political infrastructure, go inexorably to the basement.
But here both Bennet and O’Dea are considered to be of different species. Or, at least, both have the potential to be if they look deep within themselves.
Their race will be passionately fought. The balance in the Senate is in play and there is a reasonable disparity in their views, one coming from a moderate left or center perspective, the other moderate right.
However, this does not have to be a no-holds-barred death battle. It is not suspected that this is the character of either man. Both are grounded. Both understand that there are higher callings.
Our politics have become more and more dirty. What passes for political dialogue is a national disgrace marked by cheap theatrics and pointless insults.
Bennet and O’Dea, two good men separated by something less than an infinite gap, have a chance to raise the bar, raise the discourse, disagree with respect and appropriate scale, and show that it is possible to slowly heal our dreary, dysfunctional, degrading politics.
Let’s hope they catch him. More than that, let’s demand that they do.
Eric Sondermann is an independent political commentator from Colorado. He writes regularly for the ColoradoPolitics and Gazette newspapers. Contact him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann.
