The Colorado political scene is behaving like a class of second-graders unable to regain composure after little Walker Stapleton ripped a noisy stinker in home room.
Get a grip.
Stapleton, who unbeknown to most Coloradans has been the state treasurer for almost two terms, started all this political pandemonium a few months ago while trying to snag the Republican nomination for governor, which he did in June.
In what’s clearly become one of the most foolish political missteps in a generation, Stapleton started his march to GOP Primary Day by bragging he’s a fourth-generation Coloradan.
He’s no such thing. Walker grew up in Connecticut and lived the life of your average spoiled upper-class Connecticutteer by attending the best private schools and then going to the priciest colleges. Like so many who now call Colorado home, he fell in love with the state while vacationing here.
No crime in that.
But the pioneer roots he foolishly exaggerated run deep back to former Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton. For those of you who think it’s just the name of a wonky housing development along I-70, Stapleton was a big, big deal back in the 1930s. He was such a big deal, that the city eventually named its airfield-turned-international airport after him, which then became a housing development.
But what Walker Stapleton had to know, or sure as hell should have, or chose to overlook, was that Great-grampy Ben was a notorious member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Oops.
What should have been just a really dumb mistake, has instead become a crisis for the guy who thought he was only going to have to battle his dubious ties to Donald “Some-of-my-best-friends-that-hate-me-are-black” Trump and Tom “I-only-sound-like-a-racist” Tancredo.
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times dragged Walker Stapleton through his self-made political mud bath by taking the story seriously and making him the national poster boy for guilt by ancestral association.
It was a yawning story that took itself seriously saying that people with ugly family histories are somehow damaged goods. What it failed to make clear is that Walker brought this on himself by touting Great-grampy’s Colorado genes and creds without thinking it through.
The Denver Post did the same thing a few days ago. Having to weigh in after the New York Times munched on Walker’s political skeletons in its own back yard, the Post reprised the story. Again, the focus was on Great-grampy’s KKK connection and the political danger that presented. The Post dutifully quoted the usual local suspects on whether voters will make the Ben KKKonnection to Walker. But nothing in the story points out that this was just fallout from a bone-headed “Colorado Native” scheme gone way south.
All this went from pretty dumb to outhouse-rat crazy on Tuesday. That’s when the Colorado Springs Gazette ran a house editorial accusing the Post of running the KKK story to get Walker’s Democratic Challenger, Congressman Jared Polis, elected as governor and pretending, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, that Polis has even stronger ties to the KKK because he’s a Democrat.
After that, it was a dog-pile on Gazette editorialist Wayne Laugesen among Twitter trolls, hired guns, political wags, and even Westword Denver.
So here’s the thing. Grown up newspapers look down on pithing and picking on each other for day-in-and-day out newspapering. Making newswriters the news is the kind of thing New York tabs do. Not that we all don’t knock each other’s opinions with our own opinions. But Laugesen using his newspaper’s prime real estate, reserved for our sacred, inscrutable pontifications, to call out the Post for just doing the sort of thing newspapers do to every candidate bragging about their KKK-connected ancestors does neither the Gazette nor Colorado journalism any good.
Get it out of your system, Colorado. Neither Walker, Polis nor any of the media are going anywhere. Walker is no Colorado native, nor is he a member of the KKK. Polis is just from Boulder, and lord knows, that’s baggage enough.
Voters want to know about health care, jobs, education, roads, Trump, capital punishment, public lands and lines at the DMV, not this nonsense. It’s beneath the Colorado media to sink to the equivalent of laughing at so much political flatulence when so much is at stake.
But before we move on, I’d like to point out to the class that the Denver Post endorsed Cory Gardner in 2014, and the Gazette endorsed Walker Stapleton pretty much before he even became a candidate for governor. Just sayin’.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com