POLITIGAB: Everybody's a winner?

Jeff Crank and Bentley Rayburn, trying to unseat Doug Lamborn in the 5th Congressional District, each has declared himself the winner of Wednesday night's Republican candidate debate.

Crank said in a release he "decisively won," while Rayburn said his campaign is "riding a tide of momentum" following his victory.
Lamborn, the only one not claiming victory, was a no-show.

Turnabout
Crank, meanwhile, is being taken to task for his position on earmarks, those special spending measures tacked onto appropriations bills by Congress members without debate.

Crank despises earmarks, he says, and has vowed not to seek them. He also wants to prevent others from getting them.

But Crank's detractors say that position is at odds with his work as a lobbyist to aggressively pursue them.

Crank said he worked to keep money in the president's proposed budget, not to add new funding.

Crank was a lobbyist from 2001 to 2006. Most of his work was aimed at funding for a helicopter program, for which parts are made by his client, Centennial-based Air Methods Corp. He also lobbied for Let's Go Aero of Englewood to get money for a study of the Pentagon's need for cargo trailers and Omnitech Robotics International, also of Englewood, which would benefit from robotics programs.

"What I'm opposed to is earmarks that are sneaked in without oversight," he said. "I have never gone after funding for a project that wasn't supported at some level by the DoD, or the agency in question."

Crank, who hasn't been a registered lobbyist for over a year, made up to $260,000 lobbying from 2001 to 2006, about $200,000 from Air Methods.

"This is an issue I'm not going to run from, because I saw during the first Gulf War how the military was putting a lot of money into war fighting and not putting money into med-evac and rescue of those injured behind enemy lines, and it made me angry," he said, noting the type of helicopter for which he lobbied was used to rescue Jessica Lynch in the early days of the Iraq war.

The lobbying and earmark issue is being shopped by people who support one of the other candidates. A Lamborn supporter, for example, was carrying around Crank's lobbyist reports at Wednesday night's debate.

Send items to pam.zubeck@gazette.com