What Boulder liberal?
If you’ve been following Colorado’s U.S. Senate race, you know that Colorado Republican Chair Dick Wadhams has trained himself to refer to Rep. Mark Udall as “Boulder liberal Mark Udall.”
Whenever Wadhams is quoted, which is quite often because Schaffer apparently doesn’t like to talk to reporters, Wadhams spreads his name-calling propaganda.
It’s Wadhams’ PR at its slimiest, and it’s the kind of thing we pay reporters and editors keep in check, for reasons explained here.
So it was a relief to see “Boulder liberal” apparently removed from a Wadhams quote in this morning’s Rocky.
Here’s the key passage:
Two days after winning his party’s nomination, U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer went back to a necessary chore in politics: raising money.
“A lot of it is one on one,” said Schaffer’s campaign manager, Dick Wadhams. “We’re not going to raise more money than (Democratic congressman) Mark Udall, but we are going to raise what we need to win this race.”
I asked Rocky reporter Lynn Bartels, who wrote the piece, whether she responsibly removed “Boulder liberal” and replaced it with “Democratic congressman). She emailed me:
Wadhams said “Boulder liberal Mark Udall” and I only had 10 inches so I didn’t have the space to explain to readers that Udall is not from Boulder and has never lived in the city of Boulder so I used parens.