You’re probably going remember Robert Blaha when this is all over.
Whether you vote for the Colorado Springs businessman to win the crowded June primary race to be the GOP candidate to take on Democratic incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet, he’ll make an impression.
Blaha is one of a least a dozen Republican candidates certain they can win back the Senate seat from Bennet this November. He and three other candidates — John Keyser, Jack Graham and former Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier — each decided to spend the $25,000 or so it takes to get the 10,500 signatures needed to bypass the messy state convention this weekend.
In a field so crowded that just half of them is too many to keep track of, it’s hard to set yourself apart from the conservative herd.
If you’re from Colorado Springs, like Blaha, you may remember him from a couple of years ago when he ran an unsuccessful campaign to supplant Doug Lamborn as CD5’s congressman.
Otherwise, Blaha could be as unique as the college athletic director who wants to be senator. Or one of the county commissioners. Or one of the state lawmakers. Or a city councilman, businessman, political junkie and on and on.
Blaha set himself apart early on this year when he launched his campaign with a video taking shots at Bennet as an accomplice to Obamacare. The spot dark-comically depicted Obamacare as a prostate exam and threw serious shades of an age-old sexual fetish that makes most folks cringe. And there were some bobbleheads.
Totally got my attention. Since then, Blaha — a human resources consultant and motivational speaker — has been toting bobblehead dolls of Bennet around the state and taking cheeky shots to post on his Twitter account. A recent one has the doll in front of a Phillips County sign and says, “No, Michael, this isn’t where they make the screwdrivers…”
The bobblehead has become a centerpiece in his campaign that, like all of the other Republicans in the race, is all about pushing against Bennet and not each other.
In the four or five forums I’ve seen so far, every candidate agrees that 1. Obamacare must go. 2. Gitmo must stay 3. Bennet has never done anything right. 4. Any gun control law is a bad gun control law. 5. Hillary Clinton is the worst thing since Barack Obama. 6. Repeat. 7. Repeat again.
Since the litmus paper comes out of their mouths with almost the exact same color, the herd is looking for ways to persuade voters they’re all as different as they appear to each other. It’s not easy so far, in part because — unlike the woolly herd of GOP presidential candidates that just can’t say enough bad about each other, each other’s spouses, bathroom habits, genitals, intelligence, mental illness and other pertinent presidential issues — these candidates stampede all over each other to say pretty much the same thing and never, ever, ever anything remotely bad about each other.
Well, sort of. Blaha stopped by the newsroom Friday for some spirited discourse with the shamelessly liberal editor of this editorially liberal news unit.
He said right off he’s working to keep the campaign civil in light of so much nasty politics these days that is anything but civil. He said he’s different than the rest of the herd because he says it’s fruitless and just wrongheaded to vilify political opponents. Instead, he says he wants to listen hard and maybe learn something new.
“Just about every middle-ground voter in the state will be happy to hear that,” I told him. And when I pressed him to recall something he’s learned from liberals that changed his mind, or something he would laud Bennet for, he said, yep, that’s exactly what he’s talking about.
But after a lot more prodding, I don’t recall anything resembling something specific. He said his adult daughters do have strong opinions about the gender pay disparity issue, but I never heard any support for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act or anything like that.
He went so far as to say that he doesn’t allow his elbowing GOP brethren and one sisteren — El Paso County Commissioner Peggy Littleton — to just say they want to a) close the EPA b) close the Department of Education c) close Gitmo d) close Obamacare and make that their policy statement, he says he’s forcing them to say, “how.”
“You have to tell voters how you’ll make it happen,” he said.
But when I pressed him to say how he would handle a) closing the EPA b) closing Gitmo c) closing Obamacare et al, I got pretty unspecific specifics. There would be lots of study and attention to attrition at the EPA. Gitmo would pretty much stay the same and Obamacare would be replaced by a competitive insurance marketplace that would allow for interstate portability, except it wouldn’t if a deregulated, free-market insurance company didn’t want to sell in a state you’re moving to.
What I didn’t hear was a dogmatic reaction saying Democrats and all they’ve done was stupid, it was just wrong. The U.S. Senate is filled with honorables from both sides of the aisle readily accusing their opponents of being wrong and stupid.
Neither Blaha nor any of the Colorado GOP gang has so far attached themselves to a policy or a position that sounds any different than anything GOP leaders in the Senate have been trumpeting loudly. That was until Trump started trumpeting some of that stuff, too.
Despite an essentially cloned list of policy positions, Blaha says he can make a difference where the others can’t because it’s his family’s motto — one daughter even has it as a tattoo — and he means it. He doesn’t want to say he’d exactly compromise with Democrats in Washington, D.C. He acknowledges that in a world where the tea party base of the GOP has pushed Trump to where he is right now because he noisily says he will refuse to compromise, suggesting such a thing in a primary battle seeking to court those voters isn’t workable even in Colorado. Maybe especially in Colorado. So instead, he says that he’ll listen to the Democrats and then be so persuasive that his ideas on forcing local police to be the first line of defense against illegal immigrants, fighting against gun control and supporting limits to or ending abortion rights will compel the political opposition to climb on board.
His enthusiasm and passion for meaning it is compelling for sure. But his argument? We’ll see.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com. Follow the Colorado U.S Senate race on Twitter @AuroraPols through Election Day.