 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
Carroll: Easy ride for Hick
It’s Election Day, and not one in 10 Denver voters could likely even name Mayor John Hickenlooper’s opponent. Why does he have it so easy when his two immediate predecessors had to fight for political survival at the end of their first terms, each rallying to victory only during a nasty runoff?
One stock answer is that Hickenlooper is white and his predecessors weren’t.
“Both Mayor [Federico] Peña and myself took arrows for being firsts,” contends former Mayor Wellington Webb, one of several people quoted in an article in last week’s Rocky to offer this explanation.
Webb has many good qualities, but giving critics the benefit of the doubt regarding their motives is not necessarily one of them. He and Peña found themselves in re-election donnybrooks for very different reasons, as the more statesmanlike Peña readily volunteers. Given Denver’s oil bust economy in 1987, Peña recalled, “any mayor would have received complaints regardless of ethnicity or race.”
It’s not as if accusations of racism were absent in ’87: I recall a particularly tense meeting that spring at the Rocky, for example, in which one Hispanic activist after another accused this newspaper’s coverage of being skewed against the embattled mayor.
It’s good to see that Peña hasn’t spent the past 20 years stoking such imaginary grievances. “The people of Denver have been very supportive of individuals regardless of ethnic background,” he says instead.
No one ever promised incumbents a free pass — even if you’d never know it from the evidence of this year’s municipal contests.
Tibet a hopeless cause
Is there any good cause more utterly hopeless than “Free Tibet”? Or, to quote the banner that got a 29-year-old Boulderite arrested last month at a Mount Everest base camp and expelled from China 36 hours later: “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008.”
Tibet fell to Mao Zedong’s army more than 50 years ago, and its brutal integration into greater China has, if anything, accelerated in recent years, not slowed. Less than a year ago China even opened a railway to Tibet’s capital Lhasa — no mean feat given the 16,640-foot Tanggula Pass it must cross.
“Tibet, for better or worse, has been a region waiting for a train,” writes John Makin, a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute who traveled to Tibet last summer and who is remarkably serene about the cultural implications of further opening Tibet to Chinese commerce and settlement, not to mention new waves of outside tourism.
“Whether Tibetans will fare better under the Chinese government than they did under Lamaist theocracy remains to be seen,” he wrote in the magazine The American, while cheerily predicting that opportunities for youth “will multiply.” Still, he does admit that “the outlook for traditionalists is bleak.”
Yes, bleak is certainly one way to put it.
A news story said the Boulder activist, Kirsten Westby, is expected back in Colorado next week. Her political statement was risky, bold and idealistic — but it appears sadly futile, too.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
The reason that Major Hickenlooper will easily win re-election has nothing to do with his color, it has to do with who he is. He has integraty, does what he says he'll do, learns from his mistakes, doesn't blame others, and the list goes on.
In contrast, if Webb had been more interested in being the elected official for the people and less interested in having a building named after him, a building I might add which is smaller then his ego, then maybe he won't have faced such difficulties getting elected the second time. For a man who ran a common man campaign walking around in tennis shoes, once elected that was all lost.
In contrast, John Hickenlooper campaigned as a down to earth businessman and remains so today. Very approachable and no bullet proof Town Car to be driven around in.
I'm tired of seeing the "race" card get played the minute there's the smallest push back.
Posted by Eric on May 1, 2007 05:55 PMOn Tibet -- If "Free" Tibet means an independant Tibet, then yes, it may be a hopeless cause. What is worthwhile is to continue to champion equitable freedom and improved human rights in Tibet, and all of China. As for the railway, and the serenity of "journalist" John Makin -- perhaps it is worth considering why the AEI would be interested in a story about the Tibet Railway (Umm, business development, resource extraction, minerals), and explaining to your readers what the AEI is -- not the normal unbiased resource quoted in news media. You could look for more insightful analysis in one of the many other articles about the railway to Tibet -- say in the New Yorker, or in Fortune Magazine, which have both published features on the train.
Posted by Anon on May 1, 2007 06:57 PMHickenlooper is one of the most "do nothing " mayors this city has ever had. Since he has been in office, the city has not prospered, we are still in the red with our budget.
About the only thing that has prospered is Hickenloopers businesses and his friends'.
No one even knew he was up for re-election, but that is the way 'those types of people' always get elected.