Making the case for Jared Polis to become Colorado’s next governor is just as easy as understanding why Walker Stapleton is unsuited for the job.
From the onset of his campaign, Stapleton has proven himself both an inept and unprincipled politician. He can blame only himself for creating a compelling list of why he should not be governor and virtually no reason why he should.
He launched his campaign needlessly claiming to be a “fourth-generation Coloradan.”
He’s no such thing. Stapleton was born and raised in Connecticut, attended schools there and went on to Ivy League colleges. He sometimes visited family in Colorado for vacations.
There was no reason for him to fabricate his biography. There is no shortage of proud and successful political leaders who moved to Colorado, including former governors Dick Lamm and Bill Owens. Owens faithfully and successfully served Aurora as a state legislator, as state treasurer and then as governor for two terms — after moving here from his native Texas.
Anyone who calls Colorado home is a Coloradan.
Far more troubling is Stapleton’s dishonesty about his personal finances, and his unwillingness to take almost any questions from the media, especially hard ones.
Stapleton was disingenuous at best when elected state treasurer in 2010 and promising to create a blind trust for his considerable financial assets and step down as CEO of his family land-holding business. He fumbled the blind trust mission and his promise, a story in Sentinel Colorado revealed. State and federal records show he was actively working to buy out stock in the family business months after becoming treasurer. He is still listed as a consultant for the business and eligible for upwards of $150,000 as a part-time job.
It’s unclear just what services he still provides and what the actual details of his trust show because he has refused to answer Sentinel requests for comment. Answers he provided a Channel 4 TV reporter, who recently picked up on the story, were far from clarifying or satisfactory.
The most powerful arguments against Stapleton’s pitch for governor aren’t his ethical and honesty lapses, however, but the tired and dangerous policies he’s embraced.
Months into his campaign, he released details of his proposals of how best to turn around Colorado’s increasingly grim health care prognosis. The outline is virtually a history lesson of how Colorado got to the unenviable place it is today. It shows a serious lack of foresight and that Stapleton simply doesn’t have a grasp on how complicated and serious the health care crisis is.
Likewise, Stapleton’s plans for expanding and repairing roads virtually by magic, without fiscal consequence, reveals a vastly inadequate grasp of state finances and economics that Colorado residents can ill afford.
Stapleton has embraced a far-right view of gun control enjoyed only by a minority of gun-extremists. He’s vowed to undo what few gun controls the state has on the books. He’s pushed back against a red-flag bill in Colorado that garnered the backing of Republican sheriffs and police officers across the state and even legislators in his own party.
Stapleton has repeatedly boasted about his admiration for the Trump Administration, making clear that Colorado would be at grave risk in fending off a bevy of potential Trump threats to Colorado minorities, economics, civil rights, the environment, public lands and its LGBTQ residents.
Stapleton is invoking fear with fiction by claiming there’s a “proliferation of so-called ‘Sanctuary Cities,’” and that they are “a direct threat to public safety and rule of law in Colorado.”
Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs and other large and small communities are exempt from such political overreach and righteous in refusing to conscript police as immigration officers, a move that endangers the safety of everyone in the community.
None of what Stapleton is offering is what Colorado has ever has been, nor should it ever be. Stapleton is out of touch, out of bounds and out of his league in reaching for the Colorado’s governor’s chair.
Polis, however, offers ideas, policies, experience and enthusiasm that are quintessentially Colorado, and uniquely his own.
On the political scene for almost 20 years, Polis is a known quantity to Aurora, and all over the state. He brought Aurora Cinema Latino to Hoffman Heights, what was then one of the only Latino-movie theaters in the region. Polis also opened the New America School in Aurora in cooperation with the Community College of Aurora. It offers a realistic way to finish school and and the critical success that brings for so many residents who otherwise couldn’t.
While Polis has unwisely not released current tax filings that document his vast personal wealth, he has created a verifiable and accountable blind trust through a congressional ethics office. His long history and public record of philanthropy reveals a savvy and extremely generous Colorado leader. He has long focused on education and civil rights causes that level the playing field for everyone in the state.
In Congress, Polis, an inventive and successful businessman, has a proven track record of not just creating and supporting pragmatic approaches to myriad problems plaguing Colorado.
As former chairman of the state’s Board of Education, Polis developed a reputation for protecting local control of schools while at the same time helping all schools raise the bar on student performance. He recognizes two critical hurdles Colorado must overcome: a shortage of funding, and a lack of early childhood education. Consistently at or near the bottom of states for per-pupil spending, the state’s short-sightedness holds back millions of Colorado students. Polis recognizes that universal access to kindergarten and other early childhood education is critical to closing student performance gaps across a bevy of populations.
Polis is realistic and visionary in his approach saving Colorado from its health care quagmire. While Stapleton and others continue to spin useless variations on the same approaches that have created the state’s health-care crisis, Polis is offering a realistic way forward. History and similar problems all over the world have repeatedly come to one conclusion: Some form of universal health care is the only way to balance costs, access and quality. Only the very rich in Colorado are now unaffected by a system that costs so much that it threatens almost every business in Colorado. It’s a system that is increasingly unaffordable by even financially comfortable residents. Once inferior just in rural Colorado, even metro area residents can attest to the rapid decline in the quality of Colorado access and services.
Polis has long been a champion for all aspects of Colorado’s quality of life. He has been a stalwart opponent of a scheme to jeopardize the state’s vast and irreplaceable public lands, a ruse seeking an end-run around longstanding federal stewardship set in motion eons ago. Polis as governor recognizes the ethical, economic and practical benefit of protecting the environment for current and future generations, and how that can be balanced with the variety of industries that depend on access to land, water and natural resources. Everyone loses when the state allows any industry or lobby to cheat residents out of a quality of life that has long served as a powerful magnet across the nation and across the world. When it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
On every issue Coloradans care deeply about, Polis has proved to be a dynamic, flexible and savvy leader. Polis has earned and deserves your vote.