No, Jon Keyser. You won’t be winning Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet’s seat in November. You’ve just lost the primary election by losing your dignity, integrity and above all, respect for voters.
In what looked like a pathetic stunt straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook, Keyser — hand-picked and hand-groomed by big-player state Republicans to take on the politically vulnerable Bennet this fall — trashed his already tattered political career Thursday.
Keyser, acting the insolent spoiled brat, refused to answer questions from reporters about why there are at least 10 forged signatures on petitions that got him a place on the GOP primary ballot.
All he would say, repeatedly, is, “I’m on the ballot.”
The weird and sordid affair started earlier this week when Denver7 reporter Marshall Zelinger broadcast a story about some of the signatures on Keyser’s petitions being forged. Zelinger did a provocative and pretty damned effective camera-in-the-face of people whose names were forged onto those ballots.
And when he asked Keyser to comment? Crickets. For days, Kesyer and his campaign wouldn’t answer questions about what’s up with that.
Instead, his campaign has said outright that the media is in cahoots with the Democrats trying to unfairly smear Keyser to aid Bennet.
In a year where the campaign bull-crap factor is 9.5 in this race and practically across the board, Campaign Keyser just laid a perfect 10.
It doesn’t matter if Bennet’s grandmother hand-delivered the forged signature fraud story wrapped in $50 bills to every newspaper and media station in the state, the signatures are forged. Someone committed fraud. Someone has some ‘splainin’ to do.
Keyser, you could fully expect that if you were a Democrat, or if the allegations were against Bennet, the Colorado media would be barking just the same, and we would be adamant that someone start talking.
For godsake, if you fold like a whiny teenager from this, what would you have done when Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Sen. Ted Cruz got in your face or tripped you on the Senate floor? Cry? Repeat the Pledge of Allegiance like some kind of secret spell?
It appears, on the surface, that the lame company Camp Keyser hired to collect the signatures, bypassing having to politic his way onto the primary ballot, is to blame here. And Keyser could easily have turned this into a non-story by saying he wants to work with Democrats and Republicans to clean this signature industry mess up, since he could well have been and may be a victim.
But that’s not the story any more. The story now is that this political plebe thinks that he doesn’t have to answer to the public when questions arise about who he is and how his campaign works.
And so you forfeit, Keyser. The only good that comes from this is that you have served as a fine example to others of how Colorado politics are not Washington politics, and how this kind of thing will not fly. Here, words matter. Fraud matters. And your childish and arrogant behavior matters.
Yes, you may be on the ballot now, but you’ll be off the ballot soon, either when the courts rectify this fraud, or voters do in June.
If you want to take a maneuver from a more respectable play book than Trump’s, look to the U.S. Air Force, which you are member of and which you boast about at every single chance you get. Just how do you think your peers and superiors in the Air Force would react to your behavior if you were accused of something by your critics or opponents? How would “none of your goddam business” fly with the Air Force? Right. You forgot to “Aim High,” Keyser, and now it’s too late.
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