Bob Beauprez: Running on fumes

Typical of most races this year it is Democrats who have candidates with the strongest ideas. It is Republicans who are running on fear and innuendo, slime and smear. They should have accomplishments to spare; after six years in the driver's seat there should be a rash of goals met and surpassed.

They don't.

Both Ways Bob Beauprez is a case study of this failure of leadership: he's using an old (Rovian) playbook and the prefab smear of illegals to try to beat a better thinker and a better public servant in Democrat Bill Ritter.

Bob's is not a good bet this year.

While Republicans have shown us only failure after failure - globally, nationally, locally - Democrats have had to fight to make their case - and they've made it. They've fought to clear the fog of our debilitated discourse. They've had to fight a coordinated media storm that the Republicans had been perfecting for 30 years.

As the media storm was perfected with Clinton, it was overplayed with Bush.

That fight is now nearing its end. It doesn't seem like much now. All the techniques and strategies of the right have been identified and exposed.

But it will take a generation to clean up the mees they enabled both at home and, much more importantly, abroad. Voters are fed up with innumerable Republican failures - is there a computer that can count that high? That fetishized "values voter" has seen through the looking glass and is repulsed at the view: so many worthless promises - so many vain protestations over "ethics" and "morals" - so much faith in leaders who play them for fools election after election.

And one big question: are all the powerful, elected, moneyed and noisy officials really representing their values?

Our Democratic candidates have history on their side, a freshness of ideas, vibrancy of purpose, a dagger of truth and, pardon my French....

The Knowledge that we can't possibly fuck things up as bad as Republicans have these last six miserable years.

Republicans will project their very own fears on our nation and state. They'll try to intimidate our citizens into voting that fear, into playing it "safe" again. But the fumes of their hatred won't take them much further. They've played out....they're sputtering....running on empty....with fuel for just one more drive.

Their indignation will refuel itself one day, the folly/tragedy of our history will repeat. Then we'll have that fight over again and have to fight it one more time.