Hickenlooper 2020: Compromise In An Uncompromising Time

DENVER, CO – By Susan Greene for The Colorado Independent. It is a late Friday afternoon in early February and passengers at Gate 12 of Washington’s Reagan National Airport are displeased.

“Fucking United,” a lawyer-lobbyist gripes when hearing that his flight home to Denver will be delayed.

“Noooo,” grumbles a young congressional staffer who’d skipped out of the office early for a weekend of Vail powder. “I’m going to miss my ride up to the mountains.”

One passenger, though as eager to board as the others, embraces the delay. The man in a candy stripe shirt and black overcoat spends the hour introducing himself to the frequent fliers, stressed-out text messagers and others weary from their week in the orbit of a federal government cranking up after a partial, month-long shutdown.

He shakes the hand of an engineer from Golden who’d been wondering aloud if he is the Colorado governor who was term-limited out of office a few weeks earlier. Then he shakes the hands of the engineer’s colleague and the colleague’s intern and even the woman whose charger the intern is borrowing.

Another passenger wants to know if it’s true what they say on TV, that he’s running for president because, what with the shutdown and that Russian mess, Washington seems kind of, well, broken.
Hearing this, a federal worker in a Broncos scarf looks up from her iPhone. “Wait, you’re, uh, you’re…” she says, fumbling for her “camera” button.

John Hickenlooper flashes his giddy-up smile.

“Yes,” he says and reaches out his hand. “Hi, I’m John.”

A long shot

Hickenlooper is a long shot. And that’s putting it mildly.

The 14th Democrat to launch a 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, he is polling at 1 percent, campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire in the shadows of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris. Just last week, the rising Dem star, Beto O’Rourke joined what is expected to be the largest Democratic field in memory. The national press seems to adore Hickenlooper when it’s not calling him naive.

Hickenlooper was a mayor and then governor known for his careful consideration, his on-one-hand-but-on-the-other strategizing over potential outcomes, sometimes to the point of paralysis. This is a man who, while running the city in 2006, agonized over a possible bid for governor to such extent that he would go to bed thinking he was going to run and wake up thinking he wasn’t. When he finally made the announcement he would sit out that cycle, he did so with a sheet of paper on one side of which he’d typed a speech declaring he was in. On the other side he’d scribbled notes about how much he loved being the mayor of Denver. He’d wait four more years before jumping into the governor’s race.

READ MORE at The Colorado Independent