Some election tidbits:

GOP Candidate Takes 10-Point Lead in Colorado Governor’s Race.  Excerpt:

National media types have gone into overdrive to focus on the Kansas governor’s race where GOP incumbent Sam Brownback is struggling to win re-election after enacting a conservative agenda. But Brownback is within the margin of error in recent polls. That might not be the case about another governor in a larger state who is trouble for enacting a liberal agenda. The latest Quinnipiac University Poll finds Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper trailing his opponent, former GOP congressman Bob Beauprez, by 10 points.

Honestly, I’m very skeptical about this poll – I don’t see the race as anything but close.  I’d like to see Bob Beauprez win this election, but Colorado is not today what it was ten or fifteen years ago.   Governor Hickenlooper, for all his faults, still commands a powerful lead in the major metro areas of Denver and Boulder.

Could I be wrong?  It’s happened once or twice.

But there’s another indicator.  A USA Today/Suffolk poll taken on September 13-16 shows GOP Senate candidate Cory Gardner leading incumbent Mark Udall by one point, the first such poll that has Gardner in the lead.

Interesting, but not necessarily indicative; not yet.  Gardner is running what is in the opinion of yr. obdt. a lackluster campaign.

Nationally it looks like the Senate races are tightening up.  The RCP map has the Senate going (as of today) 47 Republican, 42 Democrat, with 8 tossups.   But a recent WaPo story posits that the Democrats have a 51% chance of retaining the Senate.

Again, color me skeptical.  At this point my guess is that the GOP will squeak out a narrow majority – 51 or 52 seats.

Still – it’s a bit over six weeks until what may or may not be a wave election.  That’s a long, long time in politics.

Our own Colorado is, of late, a peripatetic swing state, maintaining a rather schizophrenic purple status for the last few election cycles.  Now, to challenge Senator Udall in this November’s election, we have Republican Cory Gardner, who is calling himself a new kind of Republican.  Excerpt:

Senate candidate Cory Gardner has released a pair of campaign ads reaching out to Colorado’s all-important centrist voters, who have soured on some GOP positions, and cast himself as a “new kind of Republican” who supports over-the-counter birth control pills and renewable energy.

The TV spots released this week come in a close race against Democratic Sen. Mark Udall in a swing state that has become increasingly reluctant to elect conservatives as coastal transplants have pushed the politics to the left.

Democrats have won every top-of-the-ticket statewide race in Colorado since 2004, and Udall and his allies have followed the established playbook by attacking Gardner as being against reproductive rights and the environment.

But Gardner, a U.S. House representative, has hit back with his new ads.

In the first, which launched Monday, Gardner walks past wind turbines and asks, “So what’s a Republican, like me, doing at a wind farm?” He notes that he co-authored legislation, backed by a former Democratic governor, to create a state agency to support new Colorado renewable energy businesses. The ad’s female narrator calls Gardner “a new kind of Republican.”

You’ll forgive me, True Believers, for a little – no, a lot – of skepticism.

It seems that every time a Republican in a close race refers to himself as a “new kind of Republican,” or a “compassionate conservative,” what he really seems to be saying is “I’m tacking to the left to try to garner the moderate vote.”

Caveat:  The term “RINO” – Republican in Name Only – has been overused to the point of meaninglessness.  It has become too often used by anyone on the political Right to mean “any Republican who disagrees with me on any given issue.”

With that said, back to Cory Gardner.   What is the aspirant to Colorado’s Senate seat up to hawking wind energy, which can only survive as a heavily subsidized boondoggle?

Isn’t the GOP supposed to be the party of smaller government?  Free markets?  Fiscal responsibility?

Isn’t the GOP supposed to be in favor of removing Federal Imperial barriers to domestic oil and gas development?

Gardner is, unfortunately, playing right into Senator Mark Udall’s hands with this strategery.  He is tacking towards positions that Udall can claim higher ground on; no matter how much Gardner comes out in favor of wind farms, Udall was already there, the firstest with the mostest on this issue.

Polls show Gardner in a statistical dead heat with Udall.  And Udall’s position is far from secure; he’s still polling below 50%, not a good place for an incumbent to be.

But Gardner is making his position weaker, not stronger.  To take out an incumbent in a tight race,  you have to offer an obvious alternative – not a pale shadow, not a little bit of “more of the same, only slightly less.”  Gardner should be running on fiscal responsibility, on energy independence, on a strong national defense, on the issues that the GOP is known for – and, in the not-particularly-humble opinion of yr. obdt., if he is going to tack, tack not to the left but to the libertarian, a position that will get him farther than presenting as a Democrat-Lite.

Here’s something yr. obdt. has been saying for years:  Bring Back the Welfare Stigma.  Excerpt:

At one time, public assistance was looked upon as a moderate failure—not an irredeemable sin or uncorrectable wrong, but something you wanted to avoid if possible. European socialists realized a long time ago that such well-intentioned opprobrium served to weaken the dependent bond between citizen and state, which is why you can find single mothers on 20 years of welfare across the pond: continental leftists figured this game out a long time ago, well before the sad sacks at Richmond Public Schools. If you want to see the future of American welfare in the hands of people like Superintendent Bedden, look to Europe, where many countries have de-stigmatized their way into astronomical debt levels and widespread, chronic citizen helplessness.

Here’s a relative excerpt from my own Animal’s Manifesto:

It is not the proper role of government to shield people from the consequences of their bad decisions.   There will always be a need for a modern, prosperous society to care for the truly helpless, such as people disabled through no fault of their own, children with no adults to care for them, and so forth.  But the lazy, the indigent, the irresponsible – they have no moral claim on the fruits of the labor of the industrious.  Government, and only government, has the power to tax – to claim a portion of your resources with force of law, with the implied threat of armed force if you try to abstain.  In our age of ever-increasing welfare entitlements, that government has claimed a portion of every taxpayer’s proceeds toward just such a shield – requiring the industrious to toil longer and harder to support the indigent.

To add to that – yes, there should be some stigma attached to taking a handout from the taxpayers.   Food stamps, for example; here are some conditions recipients should face:

• Do away with the EBT cards.  Food stamps should be a variation on their original form – large, paper, clearly marked “Food Assistance Voucher.”
• And vouchers they should be, limited to only certain items.  Bulk rice, beans, potatoes, lean chicken, ground beef, and so on.  No prepared foods, no frozen foods, no soda pop, no candy.  And for those who cry “you can’t tell people what they can and can’t eat,” the only reply is “if they are spending other people’s money, we sure as hell can.”
• Locations should likewise be strictly limited.  No convenience stores, no oven-ready pizza places, no premium meat shops.  Only traditional grocery stores – Safeway, Kroger, Super Walmarts and the like.

As stated in the Manifesto and many other times in these pages, it is not the role of government (read that: the taxpayers, and read that: productive citizens) to shield people from the consequences of their own bad decisions.

The linked article concludes:

Those who have truly fallen on hard times deserve our genuine sympathy, and we should not snarl at them for turning to as easy and accessible a source of relief as government welfare. Yet we should also avoid making needy people feel comfortable being dependent upon the government. To do so is would not be merely bad public policy—it would be disingenuous and harmful to poor people, who more than anything need the mental and emotional drive to be free from government dependence.

Hear hear!  And add this to a long, long list of bad policies to come out of the Imperial City in the last couple of decades.