Can they pull it off?
Can two canny and accomplished women persuade the alwaysskeptical voters of Colorado Springs to approve a property tax hikeand rescue the city from the worst fiscal crisis it has experiencedsince the 1970s?
Will Councilwoman Jan Martin and nonprofit leader Mary EllenMcNally enter the mythic pantheon of female superheroes, joiningSupergirl and Batgirl or, more appropriately, Wonder Woman and CatWoman?
Or will they crash to earth, brought down by our very owncackling and coldly calculating Joker, the ol' Dougster hisself?
Conventional wisdom says that they have no shot. We're a stronglyRepublican, traditionally anti-tax city enduring a deep recession.The city might be in dire straits, but its leaders inspire littleconfidence.
The U.S. Olympic Committee deal, for example, showed the city atits worst.
Council members were visibly clueless and ill-informed, while soinept and incompetent were the appointed officials charged withputting the deal together that they could have emerged from a MarxBrothers movie.
It would have been endlessly amusing -- except for the veryinsignificant matter of $50 million or so in taxpayer dollarsfloating gently from the windows of City Hall into the eager arms ofthe USOC.
It's also clear that the city's revenue forecasts have beenoverly optimistic during the recession.
That might diminish voter confidence in the ability of the cityto perform basic governmental functions, like figuring out how muchmoney will flow into its coffers.
Finally, there's a certain sour congruence between the city'smost recently calculated shortfall ($37 million) and the approximateprincipal amount of city debt to be issued in support of the USOC($37 million).
M&M have six weeks to convince the voters. It might not beenough.
That's because elections are no longer elections as we onceunderstood them.
Think back to, say, 1989.
Voters relied upon The Gazette, TV and radio for theirinformation. Talk radio was in its infancy. There was no Internet assuch -- just the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, for thoseunfamiliar with ancient history) and similar bulletin boards.
There were no Web sites, no forums for political junkies, noswift and easy means of disseminating political information -- ormisinformation.
Campaigns were predictable, slow-paced and, at least inretrospect, reasonable.
Mediated by The Gazette's editors, by KOAA's John Gilbert andother gatekeepers, our civic dialogue was far less ideological, andfar more ... well, civilized than it now seems to be.
That dialogue culminated on the first Tuesday during November,when we went to the polls. It was possible to create and execute acampaign during the two months after Labor Day, when the voterstraditionally awoke from their summer torpor.
No more.
There is no election day, no single event to plan for. Ballotsarrive in the mail weeks before "election day," along with anavalanche of misleading campaign pieces. The Gazette's voice, whilestill important, is no longer dominant. Absent anger and conflict,TV and radio aren't interested.
The point? You can't get our attention.
We're constantly under assault from the floating worlds ofelectronic media. We've learned to tune it all out, to ignore thepleas of our Facebook friends, to delete e-mails without readingthem, to throw away -- excuse me -- to recycle the paper withoutreading it, to leave everything, to finish nothing and to beginagain every day.
So how do we make decisions? We don't -- we just act.
It might be that M&M understand this phenomenon better than dotheir probable opponents, who still seem wedded to the old ways. Itmight be that our two stalwart women can wage an Obama-stylecampaign, and enlist an enthusiastic army of young supporters whowill take the city by storm.
On the other hand, Obama's campaign wasn't based on a taxincrease ...
Meanwhile, it looks as if we might have not just a contentiousRepublican senatorial primary next year, but a Democratic donnybrookas well. Former House speaker Andrew Romanoff is reportedlypondering a run against appointed incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet.
Bennet has never run for elected office. He was elected to theoffice with a single vote, that of our sometimes-eccentric governor.He's never had to sit for hours and hours and listen to pettycomplaints from aggrieved constituents. He's never walked a precincton a cold winter afternoon. He hasn't spent years as a petty electedofficial, learning the art of politics.
Romanoff has. He's a guy that Dems love, and Republicans like. Hehas a light touch as a campaigner, and bipartisan instincts in ourpartisan times.
A couple of years ago, here in Colorado Springs, Romanoff wascampaigning on behalf of the newly minted Democratic legislativemajority.
"You know," he told the crowd, "the Republicans are really bad atbeing in the minority -- so let's give 'em some more practice!"
Light-hearted, civilized, a little edgy but neither insulting norideological ... you'd almost think it was 1989!
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