Romanoff touts most Colorado donors

02/01/2010 - Aspen Daily News - Andrew Travers - As the fourth quarter campaign fundraising reports were released for Colorado’s Democratic Senate primary race this week, candidate Andrew Romanoff was amid a mountain stumping swing through cities like Aspen, Glenwood Springs and Granby.

Romanoff raised less than a third, it turns out, of incumbent Michael Bennet’s $1.1 million haul from October to December of last year. But, as Romanoff pointed out Monday after a fundraiser in a West End Aspen home, he actually topped Bennet in the number of donors who gave money for his bid, with more than 2,600 writing checks.

“More Coloradans contributed to our campaign in the last three months of the year than to any other campaign in Colorado,” said Romanoff, a four-term state representative and Speaker of the Colorado House who left the post due to term limits last year. “What that says to me is folks actually want a candidate to be accountable to them, not just to the special interest groups that bankroll Congress and block reform.”

Romanoff has refused to accept contributions from corporations and “special interest” groups, which he says have tainted American politics. He has railed against the U.S. Supreme Court for their decision last month to overrule a ban on corporate campaign funding, as his campaign increasingly takes on a populist insurgent hue. It’s a somewhat unexpected turn for a public servant who ascended the ranks of the state Democratic Party through his 30s on a reputation for hard work, bipartisan congeniality and wonky bona fides.

Last week Romanoff hired Joe Trippi, the innovative Democratic strategist who ran Howard Dean’s firebrand presidential campaign in 2004.

When President Barack Obama named Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to his cabinet as interior secretary last year, vacating the senior senator’s seat, Gov. Bill Ritter passed over Romanoff and appointed former public school administrator Michael Bennet — who had never before held elected office — to fill the vacancy. After Romanoff declared he would challenge Bennet in the 2010 midterm election, the president himself endorsed Bennet.

Romanoff says that despite these party complications — and the setback of fighting for a position many assumed he had already earned — his campaign is good for Colorado and for Democrats.

“The governor filled a vacancy, which is his right, but there’s a million registered Democrats who’ve had no say in who the Democratic nominee should be,” Romanoff contended, adding that the marathon 2008 Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Obama, he believes, was good for democracy. “I also think a primary can strengthen the party, and I think it did in 2008. I think the president emerged stronger from that contest. I think a lot of people got engaged who otherwise may have sat it out.”

All the chatter about intraparty tension, fundraising and endorsements in this race may, however, be obscuring some of the strengths that made Romanoff a force among Colorado Democrats to start with: his ability to parse complex issues in governing and a sense of justice befitting this son of a social worker, now aged 43.

He singles out the economy, health care and the environment as the key issues for Colorado and the country in 2010.

On the economy, he wants Wall Street reform and an aggressive jobs package, along with responsible budgeting from Congress.

Working in the Colorado House, he says, taught him how to spend taxpayer money responsibly: “Balancing the budget in Colorado is not just a good idea, it’s the law. So every year we had to do something that Congress doesn’t, which is make revenues and expenditures match before we adjourn.”

On the fledgling Senate health care bill, he calls for axing an anti-trust exemption for insurance companies and yanking special provisions for states that had holdout senators. He specifically chides fellow Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

“If the senator from Nebraska is going to hold up the bill to extract backroom deals to benefit his state — and he did, he got his state out of Medicaid — or the senator from Louisiana negotiated what folks are calling ‘the Louisiana purchase’ in return for her support for this bill,” he said, “then one member of the U.S. Senate could stand up and say, ‘No, if you want my vote, you’re going to have to do not only what’s best for my state but what’s right for the United States.’ You didn’t see any senators stand up and say that, I’m sorry to say, in the majority party.”

On the environment, he favors a carbon tax to cut greenhouse gas emissions over the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House last year, and says the country could learn a lot from Colorado’s achievements in encouraging renewable energy in the private sector and mandating it in the public sector.

“Some members of Congress lack the courage of their convictions,” he says of why progress is proving difficult for any meaningful legislation on carbon emissions. “I’ve heard plenty of folks say, ‘Gosh, that makes perfect sense. We believe it’s the right thing to do. But we’re worried about our own re-election chances and these proposals are so easy to demonize — especially a ‘carbon tax’ that has the word ‘tax’ in it.’ ... Cowardice is part of the problem. The contributions from the nation’s biggest polluters is another part of the problem.”

Again, Romanoff echoes that he isn’t taking money from those polluters. And he says he is not worried about stepping on anybody’s toes if Colorado voters send him to Washington. “The point of getting power is not to keep it,” he says. “It’s to use it to improve the lives of the people you represent. I think sometimes folks forget that.”