Cary Kennedy: Riding On Identity As Public Education Candidate

DENVER, CO – By Tina Griego for The Colorado Independent. The Cary Kennedy for Governor campaign is headquartered near downtown Denver in a converted classroom of a restored, century-old red brick elementary school. The location is coincidental, but fitting.

All four Democratic primary candidates say they want to put more money into public education. But Kennedy has made the issue the engine of her campaign.

She has aligned herself specifically with the teachers unions and those largely opposed to education reform measures that emphasize standardized testing, the proliferation of charter schools, and the weakening of tenure protections. This position sets Kennedy apart from her primary opponents and at least the last four governors, three of them Democrats.

She is calling for more school funding so that high school counselors don’t have caseloads of 400 kids each and the front office isn’t running out of paper. She’s calling for more support staff from paras to school psychologists. She’s calling, loudly, for higher pay so that teachers aren’t forced to choose between the schools they love, the students they have nurtured, the communities they call home and their own families’ well being. It doesn’t make sense, she says everywhere she goes, that Colorado has the number-one ranked economy in the nation, but that its investment in K-12 and higher education ranks near the bottom.

On the first weekend in June, teachers’ union members and other supporters gathered at Kennedy headquarters for a quick convening before knocking on doors in East Denver. Several South High School teachers showed up wearing red T-shirts, the color adopted from protesting teachers in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma and here in Colorado. On the back of the tee: a raised fist clenching a pencil and, in all caps, the words “Public education is a civil right.” A handmade sign on a wall read “Spoiler Alert: Women Don’t Give Up.”

The excitement in the room was palpable. Kennedy’s campaign had built undeniable momentum, dominating the March caucuses and the state Democratic assembly in April. The base was solid. She’d won the coveted endorsement of Ken Salazar, the Democratic powerhouse who was a former state Attorney General, U.S. senator and Secretary of the Interior. By mid-June, the campaign would raise nearly $2 million. Kennedy had turned a four-person primary into a two-person race, hot on the heels of the Congressman Jared Polis. Sure, a couple days earlier Gov. John Hickenlooper had publicly tsk-tsked an attack ad — or, as Kennedy referred to it, a “contrast ad” — aired on her behalf against Polis and former state Sen. Mike Johnston.

But on this day, in this room, Hickenlooper’s “play nice” admonition largely was dismissed by those mingling as little more than a patriarchal blip. Union reps lauded Kennedy for her record supporting more funding for public education. Should she win the governorship, they declared, Colorado could become a “guiding light” for the rest of the nation.

Hanna Vaandering, a member of the National Education Association’s executive committee and an elementary school PE teacher, fired up the already-enthusiastic crowd by saying she had a few questions, “and I’m not going to use the question I usually use, which is ‘Which is more detrimental to public education: grizzly bears or Betsy Devos?’

“I’m not going to go there,” she said, over laughter. “But do you believe in public education?”

“Yes!” the group shouted.

“Do you believe that educators should be driving education policy?”

“Yes!”

“Do you believe in Cary Kennedy?"

“Yes!”

“Again, do you really believe in Cary Kennedy?”

“Yes!”

“Give it up for the first female governor of Colorado!”

The room erupted.

Riding a wave (or two)

Timing is to politics what location is to real estate. And Kennedy, former state treasurer, former deputy mayor and chief financial officer of Denver, has possessed impeccable timing in this race.

Her campaign has coincided with the wave of frustration expressed this spring by public school teachers protesting on the streets and in the state capitals of several states. And it has coincided with the wave of frustration expressed by women in the aftermath of the President Trump’s election and the rise of the #MeToo movement.

Timing alone is never enough, especially in a tough primary, but it offers wind in the sails. And on the campaign trail, Kennedy is confident, speaking with her characteristic mix of ebullience and earnestness. She does not simply smile, she beams.

“She is the ‘life-is-good,’ candidate in that ‘let’s work together and fix things,’ way. She is an antidote to Trump and his anger,” says Karen Benker, who worked with Kennedy as budget analyst in the Office of Planning and Budgeting during the Romer administration in the ‘90s.

It has been 20 years since a woman was on the ballot for governor in Colorado and now two are in contention – Kennedy and Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne. Women currently hold six of the 50 governorships, and a record number of women are running for statewide or Congressional offices. By the end of March, 40 women had filed to run in 36 gubernatorial races.

Colorado has not in its 142 years of statehood elected a woman as its chief executive and that played an undeniable role in this year’s support for both Kennedy’s and Lynne’s candidacies. All of its nearby neighbors, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma have elected women governors.
“Colorado has had a very poor track record as a state bringing women into either [the governor’s office or U.S. Senate],” says Judi Wagner, a retired investment manager who has spent years helping women in Colorado and nationally win elected office.

As she sees it, women generally bring a higher emphasis on collaboration and open-mindedness to the job, and Coloradans of both genders want those qualities in their next governor. “Cary is just qualified, period. The fact that she’s a woman is irrelevant to her ability to do an outstanding job as governor. However, there are characteristics she brings as a woman that will make her even better and I think a high percentage of women – and even men – would be delighted to see her win.

“It’s just time.”

For two decades, Wagner has been teaming up with former Lt. Gov. Gail Schoettler who, like Kennedy, served as state treasurer before running for governor in 1998 – the last time a woman made the gubernatorial ballot. Schoettler was vastly outspent by Bill Owens in that race, losing to the former oil and gas operative and Republican establishment favorite by fewer than 8,000 votes. “We’ve got to get more organized,” Wagner told Schoettler when both committed that year to helping women candidates overcome financial barriers that tend to give business titans and men with lucrative ties to industry more access to campaign funding.

For years now, Wagner said, she and Schoettler, along with enthusiastic, well-organized, state and national networks of women Democrats – both progressive and moderate – have been working to remove such barriers for female candidates and, in more recent years, specifically for Kennedy.

For her part, Kennedy wants voters to support her because they believe she is qualified to lead the state, but says it is a privilege “to inspire young women and young girls to see themselves as leaders, to never be afraid to stand up and share their voices, share their opinions.”

Carpooling

Kennedy was a longtime inhabitant of the public policy and budget world before she turned to public office. Her work as a budget analyst in Roy Romer’s administration in the ‘90s brought her a mastery of the intricacies of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the 1992 voter-approved constitutional amendment that limits how much revenue the state can collect — and therefore spend. As the economy grew, but spending limits forced cuts to public education, Kennedy began crafting what in 2000 would become the first voter-approved constitutional amendment mandating annual increases to school funding. Amendment 23 was one of her signature achievements — in some eyes one that caused as many problems as it solved — but it helped cement her reputation as someone uniquely qualified to find money for public education in the Gordian Knot of Colorado’s financial constraints.

“For Cary, there was a mismatch between our economy and having to cut schools,” says Lisa Weil, an education advocate and longtime friend of Kennedy’s who also worked on the amendment. “She has a fundamental belief that education is the key to opportunity. It just stuck in her craw and she wanted to make it better.”

Kennedy’s reputation as a public school advocate was enhanced after her election to the state Treasurer’s office in 2006 when she successfully took on the challenge of figuring out how to pay for the repair and rebuilding of the state’s aging schools without raising taxes. It was huge, complex policy, requiring a level of detailed thinking that Kennedy not only excelled at, but reveled in, says Mary Wickersham, who worked as Kennedy’s director of strategic initiatives and who had been working on the problem before she joined the office. The solution, the Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) program, used state land trust money to seed competitive grants that helped fix or build almost 400 schools. Championed by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, it passed the House with a 64-1 vote.

“If you [now] go into these communities, the school is the heart of the community,” Wickersham says. “It’s where they do all their Elks Club meetings, the Fourth of July picnics and the choir performances. And it’s where all of their kids go to school and many of their adults went to school. Having a new school is just transformative.”

Kennedy’s two kids were in elementary school when she was elected treasurer, and once she took office she told her deputy treasurer Eric Rothaus, that she’d be blocking off time in her schedule for their carpool. “And I was like, ‘What?’” he recounts. “I was like ‘No, state treasurers don’t do that,’ and she said, ‘This one does.’
“That was a non-negotiable because her kids were 6 and 8. She’d say, ‘I’ll come back in afterward’ and she would and she would stay up reading a lot of stuff and come back in the morning with a lot of questions for me about this, that or the other.”

So devoted to the carpool is Kennedy — “you get to hear what’s really going on in your kids’ lives” — that she announced her candidacy last April in a much-mocked and consequently much-watched Facebook Live postshot in her car as she drove home from dropping her daughter off at high school.
Working moms juggle, Kennedy says, laughing at the memory of arriving at the Capitol after taking her kids to school one morning only to discover her daughter’s shoes on the top of the car.

Read more in the Colorado Independent

Susan Greene contributed to this story.

Photos of Cary Kennedy by Phil Cherner

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