Looks like Udall vs. Schaffer for Senate

DENVER - The 2008 election is almost 18 months away, but Colorado’s U.S. Senate race seems to have shaped up as Democratic Rep. Mark Udall versus former Republican congressman Bob Schaffer.

Schaffer told Boulder County Republicans at the Lincoln Day dinner Saturday that he will seek retiring GOP Sen. Wayne Allard’s seat.

Monday, two other prominent Republicans who were looking at the race said they will defer to Schaffer and avoid the kind of costly infighting that has led to GOP losses in the past two major statewide contests.

“I am not interested in a primary with Bob Schaffer,” said Attorney General John Suthers, who withdrew his name from Senate consideration along with retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Bentley Rayburn. “This is just not the time to have any kind of divisive primary in the Republican Party.”

That likely clears the way for a match-up that leaders from both parties say will be a contrast in ideologies. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee sought immediately to label Schaffer an extreme conservative, while Republicans have begun to refer to Udall as the “Boulder liberal.”

Udall has served the Bouldercentered 2nd Congressional District since 1999, gaining a reputation as an environmentalist and recently branching out to gain Colorado’s only seat on the House Armed Services Committee. He has said since 2005 that he would make this race, and he filed paperwork to do so with the Federal Election Commission last month.

Schaffer represented the 4th Congressional District, which included Fort Collins, northeast Colorado and the eastern plains, from 1997 to 2002. He ran unsuccessfully for the GOP’s Senate nomination in 2004, was elected to the Colorado Board of Education in 2006 and filed his Senate paperwork last week.

Not satisfied with clearing out the Republican primary field, Schaffer said Monday that he plans to spend the rest of the year promoting dramatic reform within a party that has lost its way on fiscal and immigration issues. He and the GOP are headed for another loss unless they are willing to rein in spending and to be able to properly define the enemy in the ongoing war not as terror but as “a bizarre interpretation of Islamic totalitarians,” he said.

“We have to have an uncomfortable and candid conversation about what Republicans propose for the future of our state and the future of our nation,” Schaffer said. “And then we need to regain the confidence of unaffiliated voters.”

Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dick Wadhams said he is confident Schaffer can win a race that others, such as former Congressman Scott McInnis, decided not to wage. Wadhams called Schaffer a “mainstream Colorado conservative.”

But Democrats said the GOP picked the “last kid on the playground,” citing such extreme views as a vote against the post-9/11 Aviation Security Act and his support for the Iraq war even after no weapons of mass destruction were found.

“There are conservative candidates, and there are candidates from the fringe of their party, and that’s where Bob Schaffer is,” said DSCC spokesman Matthew Miller.

No other major Democrats or Republicans have indicated serious interest in the race.

CONTACT THE WRITER: (303)837-0613 or ed.sealover@gazette.com