NOREEN: Curly Joe challenges Larry and Moe
It wasn’t enough that the Colorado Republican gubernatorial race featured Larry and Moe. On Monday, Curly Joe apparently will enter the race, as well.
For pure political entertainment, Colorado hasn’t seen this kind of fun since May 1987, when former Sen. Gary Hart’s escapades aboard a boat called “Monkey Business” put a quick end to his presidential aspirations. Overnight, a viable candidate with momentum and proven fundraising ability became a punch line.
Republican frontrunner Scott McInnis, now has a strong lead in the polls over outgunned Tea Party favorite Dan Maes but has been in a tailspin since it was revealed that he was paid $300,000 for articles entitled “Musings on Water” that were substantially plagiarized from decades-old work written by Gregory Hobbs, now a Colorado Supreme Court justice. Most observers think McInnis can still beat Maes, who has his own troubles after disclosing that his income was below the federal poverty line in two of the last five years -- not good for a guy who has been bragging up his business expertise.
It also didn’t help that Maes was fined $17,000 for campaign violations.
Along with Democratic hopeful John Hickenlooper, we’ve all watched as Maes and McInnis stumbled over each other in the spotlight like two of the Three Stooges. Now the third man in will be former Congressman Tom Tancredo, who last week threatened to run for governor if McInnis and Maes do not quit the race by Monday.
Tancredo is best known for his hard line on immigration, but he also once advocated bombing Mecca as a response to terrorism. He’s called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama.
Colorado GOP Chairman Dick Wadhams said if Tancredo enters the race he would be responsible for torpedoing Republican hopes. But it looks more like Tancredo would be torpedoing wreckage already at the bottom of the lagoon.
For true homespun political comedy, it really doesn’t get any better than this. Asked to rate Tancredo’s chances, long-time political analyst John Straayer just laughed at the GOP’s foibles.
“Who would have thought that after that 2006 Marc Holtzman-Bob Beauprez entertainment, they’d be able to top that?” Straayer said, alluding to the GOP gubernatorial disaster of four years ago.
Some GOP officials reportedly are hoping that McInnis can win the primary, then be strong-armed into quitting the race so the party can install a new candidate. That tens of thousands of unaffiliated voters would be put off by such back-room shenanigans seems not to matter.
If McInnis wins the primary and quits, “nobody will believe that he did it willingly,” Straayer said.
This year’s inevitable rising tide was supposed to lift all GOP boats, but the Red Sea seems to have parted.
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