The Denver Post’s Sunday editorial, “Immigration’s Time Has Come,” pointed out the “flaws” in not one but two GOP immigration bills, floated or introduced last week in Congress.

One proposal actually reduces visas for poor people from places like Africa, to make room for higher-achieving immigrants, favoring one group over the other. The other bill allows undocumented kids to attend college and get work visas.

But neither offers a path to citizenship, as The Post favors.

Why doesn’t The Post get local and offer some suggestions on how our favorite local Republicans will get on board?

The Post need look no further than its own website to find Rep. Mike Coffman saying:

Coffman: “I consider myself aligned with Congressman Tancredo in that he fundamentally believes that we need to secure our borders and that we should not grant either amnesty and a path to citizenship to those who have violated our laws.”

Rep. Scott Tipton also has opposed it on The Post’s pages, as did Rep. Doug Lamborn. Rep. Cory Gardner opposes it, too.

It’s great for The Post to favor comprehensive immigration reform and to criticize the GOP’s half-baked proposals.

But does it have any suggestions on how Colorado’s Republican Congressmen can buck off the hard-line anti-immigration activists and talk-radio hosts from their backs and support comprehensive immigration reform?

I’m late getting to this, but I’ve been hearing conservatives trying to make themselves feel better about their election collapse by saying they successfully cut the gender gap in Colorado.

I’m thinking they might have scanned every word in The Denver Post, searching for something good, and found this sentence in a Nov. 6 article:

Although many polls nationally predicted a significant gender gap, Colorado exit polls showed women and men split equally.

Later, Democratic consultant Craig Hughes tweeted:

Craig Hughes@CraigHughesinCO

Dear Media: The Colorado exit polls are simply not accurate. Trust them at your own risk. Thank you. #copolitics

I asked Hughes to amplify, and he sent me these thoughts in an email.

First, we know the exits originally said that Colorado was tied at 48% for each candidate – when final results are tallied, Obama will carry Colorado by over 5%, so that’s a significant miss.  Second, the exits show that Obama’s Colorado margin was bigger among men (+5%) than women (+3%) which runs contrary to every single public and private poll conducted over the past two years.  In reality, Obama almost certainly carried women with a double digit margin.  Third, the exits list “NA” for voters aged 18-29, even though they make up 20% of the electorate, a larger portion than voters 65+.  Given those sample sizes, how is it they are unable to show results for voters aged 18-29?

Fourth, there are also exit poll results published by Latino Decisions that show Obama received 87% of the Latino vote, while the networks survey shows 75%.  I’d say 75% seems about right, but that’s a pretty big discrepancy.

If people want a look at what the electorate likely was, I’d suggest looking at the poll by Keating Research conducted just prior to the election that showed Obama +4%.  His numbers are more reliable to me than anything I have seen out of the exit polls in this, or previous, cycles (again, ask President Kerry about exit poll reliability).

So if you happen to be one of those Republicans who was feeling good because of those 18 encouraging words in the Denver Post, about women liking you more than before, I’m sorry I had to be the one, with the help of Hughes, to set the record straight.

The headline on an Associated Press story last week, juxtaposed to the GOP comments in the article, tell you all you need to know about how it’s one thing for Republicans to promise to be nicer to Hispanics, as Josh Penry and Rob Witwer did recently, and another thing for them to stop pushing policies that do nothing but alienate Hispanics from the GOP.

First, the headline of the AP story:

“Colorado Democrats Plan To Pass Tuition Aid For Immigrants”

Then, the GOP response toward the end of the story:

Arvada Republican Rep. Libby Szabo said it was too soon to tell whether her party would support the tuition legislation.

“One thing I learned in my first legislative session is that I don’t comment on anything I have not seen,” she said.

Szabo, who was elected to be her party’s assistant House minority leader Thursday, made her gender and her Latino background part of her pitch for the leadership post, saying, “I am a woman Latino, and I think it would speak big if we didn’t just talk about reaching out to them, but we said we are going to put someone in leadership who is actually one of them.”

So Szabo couldn’t even commit her own support to the state version of the Dream Act, much less the members of her party who organized opposition this summer when Metro State University dared to lower tuition rates for undocumented kids.

Instead, Szabo makes a parody of herself by saying, look at me! I’m proof positive that the GOP likes Hispanics!

So here’s the point of this blog post: Reporters shouldn’t let Republicans get away with saying they support Hispanics without asking for those ugly specifics, which go beyond good looks and leadership positions.

As The Denver Post’s Alicia Caldwell said during an excellent discussion of the election on Rocky Mountain PBS’ Colorado State of Mind Nov. 9, “You have to change policies as well as faces.”

As my colleague Michael Lund pointed out, polling shows Hispanics, to the extent you can generalize, care most about jobs and the economy, as well as education, immigration, and healthcare–and the Colorado GOP doesn’t offer them much on these fronts. Project New America polling also showed that basic concern and the poor matters.

The question is, what will Colorado Republicans offer Hispanics in any of these areas?

Will Republicans offer anything on the economy except de-regulation and tax cuts?  On healthcare, will the Colorado GOP stop trying to block implementation of Obamacare? On education, will they finally get behind the reduced tuition bill that Szabo is noncommittal about? Will they support a pathway for citizenship both for undocumented children as well their parents? Do Republicans think they need to become Democrats to win over Hispanics?

If Republicans aren’t pressed, we’ll get the kind of rhetoric Penry and Witwer offered up this weekend in The Post:

Great, a reporter should say to Penry and Witwer, but where’s the burrito?

Last week, The Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels posted an email from Rep. Ken Summers, in which he explained why he thought he lost his State Senate race against Democrat Andy Kerr.

Summers wrote Bartels that his opponents lied about him and distorted his views. He wrote, for example:

I have never been supportive of the personhood amendment, but that was the basis for saying Ken Summers is against contraception.

This sentence caught my attention because it directly contradicted Summers’ response to a 2008 Rocky Mountain News candidate questionnaire, which you can see with your own eyes here: Ken Summers’ 2008 Rocky Mountain News candidate questionnaire

In it, Summers, a Republican and former pastor, answers plainly:

Do you support Amendment 48? It would ban abortion by defining personhood as beginning at fertilization.

Summers: Yes

In the candidate’s words: A new baseline for this issue is needed. Clarifications will be needed.

In her blog post, Bartels didn’t correct Summers’ statement. Nor did she do so after a commenter spotlighted the factual error. Clearly, she should have set Summers straight for the record, because these details matter.

And of course, more could be written about Summers and personhood, even though the election seems like ages ago already, and Summers lost.

People might want to know why Summers apparently has no recollection of supporting personhood, and whether he understood that it would, in fact, ban many forms of birth control, in addition to all abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.

Would Summers, who I’ve found to be relatively reasonable, be less angry at the “nasty” mailers of his opponents, and more upset with his own self, if he were reminded of his 2008 endorsement of personhood? Perhaps he thought his extreme position on abortion was private, that he’d not gone public with it, and he simply forgot about the Rocky questionnaire.

Who knows?

But from a journalistic perspective, it proves the point that’s been proven over and over again, that nasty things usually look a lot less nasty when you report both sides and put the facts on the table.

Election losers inevitably turn their anger toward the news media, and that’s what Rep. Cory Gardner did Tuesday night when he told KNUS.

“When the American people were watching the news with their family at the dinner table, they saw a media that is gung-ho for the President,” Gardner told KNUS last night. “So not only were we running an election against the President of the United States, we were running an election against TV stations around the country and inside people’s living rooms.”

Seems like the 1950’s rearing itself up again in the GOP mind here, because when was the last time the family ate dinner and watched the evening news together? My kid tries to reach for his computer, while eating at our dinner table, but I’ve always assumed it’s Facebook he’s glued to, not Brian Williams. And TV anchors are the last things I want to see at dinner.

But more to the point, KNUS host Steve Kelley should have asked Gardner for examples of the pro-Obama media bent. It’s far more productive to criticize the media with specifics than with generalities.

And here’s a specific example of how media intervention, albeit by print media, led, probably unintentionally, toward a blip of pro-Romney ink.

Close readers of The Denver Post, and I mean really dedicated readers, may remember consultant Eric Sondermann’s prediction, in the newspaper the Sunday before the election, that Romney would win the Electoral College Vote:

Sondermann: “The burden of being the independent on the panel with no obligation to cheerlead. With abundant doubt, I am going to call it for Romney. Closing momentum trumps meticulous organization. The popular vote margin is large enough to bring along the electoral math. The mantle of ‘change’ shifts.”

I was surprised to see this because on KBDI’s Colorado Inside Out on Friday night (at the 10:50 mark), Sondermann said:

Sondermann: “This thing is way too close to call. Anyone who tells you where this thing is going is lying to themselves and to somebody else.”

Sondermann told me today that Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Curtis Hubbard pushed Sondermann to make a prediction, after Sondermann had initially tried not to do so.

“My first submission was to try to hedge it, and Curtis Hubbard, completely appropriately, asked me to call it,” Sondermann said.

Sondermann was the lone “independent” on The Post’s “Battleground” panel, which was assembled to analyze election issues.

“There was nothing wrong with Curtis pushing me to make a call,” Sondermann said.

It wouldn’t have made “interesting reading,” Sondermann told me, for the three people one the left to say one thing (Obama wins), the three on the other to say something else (Romney wins), and for the person in the middle (Sondermann) to make no prediction at all.

I’d argue that Hubbard shouldn’t have pushed Sondermann to come down on one side or the other.

The truth is that calling the election a tossup was completely reasonable. And you’d think Hubbard would have expected Sondermann to choose Romney, if pushed. I find Sondermann right leaning, and his selection of Romney, based on nonexistent “momentum,” is one piece of evidence that I’m right. But that’s just speculation and weakly supported opinion on my part, obviously.

In explaining his Romney prediction, Sondermann said he wrongly saw the election as being “akin” to the Reagan-Carter contest, featuring a “bad economy and a beleaguered incumbent” when, in fact, the right frame was Bush-Kerry.  Like the Bush-Kerry race, this election was “a whole series of hotly contested narrow victories that when all put together equal a substantial triumph,” Sondermann said.

You can find plenty wrong with The Denver Post, especially if you’re wishing it were what it used to be, but you have to respect the newspaper for trying to get basic information about all Colorado candidates on the record for voters to chew on, spit out, or whatever.

That’s why The Denver Post’s voter guide is such a beautiful thing. It asks  all state candidates a bunch of questions, both broad and specific.

The questionnaire represents a speck of hope for civil debate—and it was obviously ton of work by the news side of The Post to get it together.

Oh, you haven’t heard about it? That’s because The Post has barely mentioned it, even though it represents a basic and respected function of a newspaper. I didn’t find a single mention of the voter guide in The Post’s print edition.

With the voter guide flying under the radar, it was easy for candidates, Republicans especially, to sit back and blow it off.

For state legislative races overall, 12 of 85 GOP candidates (14%) returned The Denver Post questionnaire, while 57 of 78 Democratic candidates (73%) returned it (seven races had no Dem candidate).

For the State House, 56 Republicans didn’t submit the questionnaire, and nine did.  For Dems, 19 did not and 41 did submit. (Dems did not run in five races.) So, in 33 House races, Dems filled out questionnaires but not Republicans. In one race, a Republican filled out a form, but not a Dem.

For the State Senate, 17 GOP Senate candidates did not submit it, and three did. Sixteen Dems filled it out, and two did not. Dems didn’t field a candidate in two races. For 13 races, Democrats filled out a questionnaire but not a Republican. And in one race, a Republican filled out a questionnaire and not a Dem.

Rather than write angry news articles and editorials about this, The Post didn’t publish anything, as far as I can tell, even though you might think the response-rate to the questionnaire would have been blasted far and wide by The Post, pressuring candidates, mostly Republicans, to answer basic questions, and showing subscribers that the newspaper is fighting for them.

But no such luck. Too bad for us, and for The Post.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS FROM THE DENVER POST VOTER GUIDE

First, it asks for education, endorsements, community service, etc., then  it poses these questions:

• Briefly describe the biggest issues facing your constituents.
• Name an issue where you have disagreed or are likely to disagree with your party’s legislative leadership?
• What is the top reason voters should support you over your opponent?
• The state’s sales tax is now at 2.9 percent after being cut from 3 percent by lawmakers in 1999. Meanwhile, the state’s income tax was at 5 percent in 1999 but has since been cut to 4.63 percent by lawmakers. Are there conditions under which you would support asking voters to raise sales and income taxes back up to their 1999 levels? If so, describe them.
• Name one law you would repeal in Colorado state legislature.
• A major criticism of the Senior Homestead Exemption program is that it gives a property tax break to qualifying seniors, regardless of their wealth. Would you support a means test for the Senior Homestead Exemption?
• Should the legislature pass a law allowing the university to set its own policies on carrying weapons on campus?
• Do you support efforts to charge lower tuition than the out-of state rate for children of illegal immigrants at Colorado’s public colleges and universities?
• Would you support a law returning the power to appoint trustees in the 10 largest counties back to the county government?
• Would you support a law requiring online retailers to charge sales tax?
• Would you support statewide rules that increase setbacks for oil and gas drilling near residential areas?
• Do you support efforts to repeal defense of marriage act which bans Gay marriage in Colorado?
• Do you support the legal recognition of civil unions?
• Would you support referring to voters a tax increase a ballot question to support transportation improvement?
• Many critics of Colorado’s initiative petition process say it’s too easy to amend the state constitution and that this has had negative results for the state. Would you support asking voters to make it harder to amend the constitution?
• Would you support adding a “personhood” amendment to the Colorado Constitution, declaring a fertilized human egg to be a person and to have the fundamental legal protections a person has?
• Do you agree with Roe v. Wade?
• If no, do you believe in an exception for rape/incest?
• Do you support Amendment 64, the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act?
• Do you support greater transparency and access to government records?
• Would you fight against rules that weaken public access to government?
• How would you address the challenged Colorado economy and seek to impact job growth?
• Has the legislature done enough to reform PERA, or should additional measures be taken? If so, what would you advocate?

If I were looking for someone to write an article against Denver’s so-called “de-Brucing” ballot measure, I think I’d have to go with…Doug Bruce!

He’s the one who pushed TABOR on Colorado, and he’d be the logical choice to explain why Denver should not be allowed to keep more of the taxes the city already collects.

But for its Oct. 7 point-counterpoint on this topic, The Post chose Mark Ver Hoeve to make the case.

So, to fill in the media gap, I called Bruce for his reaction to The Post’s decision to skip over him in favor of Hoeve.

Bruce started off by telling me he doesn’t “pay attention to The Denver Post.”

“I don’t have a bird cage,” he said.

“They don’t want to get me to write anything. They are trying to demonize me and isolate me.”

Bruce was angry that The Post used the phrase “de-Bruce” in its headline for its point-counterpoint piece against Denver Measure 2A. It’s not about him, he says.

I asked him how his recent legal problems would affect the anti-tax movement.

“I don’t think this is an anti-tax movement. It’s government. I mean, obviously TABOR anticipated that government would try and get more tax revenue.”

“This is a volunteer effort,” he says. “It has cost me a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of grief.  It’s now cost me cases and various other things.”

But, still, will Bruce’s recent conviction of tax evasion hurt the chances that Denver Measure 2A passes?

“I don’t think it will,” he said. “But they did their best to destroy me, just so that I couldn’t be a spokesman, you know.  I mean, they wanted to destroy my political credibility and so forth. No firearms, now. I’m on probation.  My case is under appeal, by the way.  It will be overturned because I did nothing wrong.”

Getting back to Denver Measure 2A, he said, “Do we really want to vote for a virtually unlimited tax increase in a recession?”

“They win about half the time.”

In one of many good political stories recently, Westword reported this week that a recent ad campaign by Coorstek, the company formerly run by congressional candidate Joe Coors, was allegedly not intended to influence Coors’ race against Rep. Ed Perlmutter.

Westword quoted a statement from CoorsTek spokesman Dane Bartlett:

For over 100 years CoorsTek has been a proud employer in Colorado and like any other business, we are proud of our job creation record in the United States. In an effort to preserve and promote our good brand, CoorsTek distributed the mailer to our neighbors in and around Golden, Colorado.

CoorsTek sent the mailer to voters stating, in part, that the “Colorado-based company” invested $54M “in Colorado jobs this past year.”

Citing ColoradoPols, which originally broke the story, Westword’s Sam Levin reported:

CoorsTek, a ceramics business formerly called Coors Porcelain Company, recently sent out the mailer, which — at the height of election season in a race where millions of dollars are being spent on ads — certainly looks similar to political propaganda….

The mailer seemed odd to the Perlmutter campaigners, because it appears to be a direct response to their accusations that Coors, as the president and CEO of CoorsTek, outsourced manufacturing jobs to Asia. (The Perlmutter team has pointed to the opening of facilities in Korea, while Coors has said the company set up operations overseas to remain globally competitive but did not sacrifice any American jobs).

While the mailer, which points to a website called Creatingjobsincolorado.com, seems to be addressing one of the key debates that have emerged in the race, it does not have any political disclaimers. For that reason, it isn’t clear what connection it might have to the Coors campaign.

An interesting addition to the story is that this is not the first time a Coors company engaged in “reputational management” during the height of an election campaign.

In 2004, the Coors Brewing Co. did pretty much exactly the same thing, in apparent support of Pete Coors bid for U.S. Senate against Ken Salazar. Coors Brewing said that there had been no coordination between Coors’ campaign and the Coors Brewing Co. Like CoorsTek, Coors Brewing Co. denied that its advertising had anything to do with electing Coors, despite the appearance of it, and instead was based on business considerations only.

The Rocky Mountain News reported at the time (Oct. 30, 2004, “Timing of Coors Co. Ads Called  Improper”):

Full-page ads ran in the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post Friday touting the brewer’s environmental record, jobs creation and charitable contributions…
The ad depicts a mountain scene under the heading “Colorado Born & Raised, And Proud Of It.” The copy covers the beginnings of the company and an overview of its economic impact on the state.
This new wrinkle has surfaced at the tail end of a bitter campaign between Republican Coors , who stepped down as chairman of the family-founded company to run for office, and Democrat Ken Salazar. Anti-Coors ads portray the brewery as a polluter that cut hundreds of jobs and also outsourced them…
The brewery decided a week ago to place the ads as an answer to “ruthless and relentless attacks,” said Coors Brewing Co. spokeswoman Laura Sankey.

Rep. Mike Coffman stands alone as a major Colorado politician in close election who has not withdrawn his previous support for the personhood amendment, which would ban all abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.

In 2010, Ken Buck walked away from personhood, saying he didn’t understand the amendment, though he stuck to his position against abortion for rape.

And this election, personhood donor Joe Coors withdrew support of the amendment with no explanation, as if he’d never been a backer.

I honestly feel bad for personhood activists who stand there watching these guys flip like this. And I’m not just saying that. It happens on the left side of the political spectrum too. It sucks.

But Coffman isn’t running away from his personhood past. He’s not jumping up and down for personhood. In fact, he says social issues aren’t his focus, but he has yet to denounce it, and he’s maintaining his opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.

I would have liked to read an article, even an itsy bitsy one, on how personhood folks feel about Coffman. So I asked well-known personhood organizer Leslie Hanks if she was surprised by Coffman’s stance.

“Not at all,” she emailed me. “That’s the difference between a statesman and a politician.”

Hanks, who recently retired as president of Colorado Right to Life, is a veteran personhood leader in the state.

“It’s a courageous stand, especially that district,” said one well-placed national pro-life activist, who didn’t want his name used due to possible political backlash. “It says a lot about Mike Coffman. It pleases me greatly.”

Coffman’s dedication to this issue appears to be longstanding.

Mike Coffman once wrote a letter to Dan Caplis to clarify his position against abortion, even in the case of rape and incest. It was incorrectly announced on the radio show that Coffman was pro-choice when it came to abortion for rape or incest.

Asked about this in August, Caplis emailed me he wasn’t surprised that Coffman went out of his way to be clear that he was against abortion in the case of rape and incest. “Mike has always been such a champion of the pro-life cause that I think the issue was quickly resolved,” Caplis wrote.

Update: On Friday, Oct. 26, The Post added the column to its website.

———————

A couple weeks ago, syndicated columnist Al Lewis wrote a devastating piece about Joe Coors, which The Denver Post didn’t run.

That was a surprise, because The Post posts most all of Lewis’ columns online–and usually one runs in the business section of Sunday’s print edition.

Amped up by the election, I was thinking that the plain-spoken destruction of Coors by Lewis might have led to its absence from The Post’s slice of cyberspace.

Lewis’ column raised questions about how Coors can get away with touting his business expertise on the campaign trail when Coors “gave millions in 2002 to a con artist who promised him a 75% weekly rate of return.”

But what added value to this old story was Coors’ refusal to talk to Lewis, a former Post columnist who now writes for Dow Jones:

I would have let him tell the story in his own words, instead of the words in a trail of federal court documents, old news reports, and his adversaries. But his communications director, Michelle Yi, responded to my request in an email, saying that Coors was too busy with his campaign to give me an interview. “We can and will try to arrange something most definitely after the election,” she wrote. [Bigmedia emphasis]

Yi’s response goes down in my annals of public relations strategies as “nice try.” Coors wants to campaign on his record as a great businessman, but like a Las Vegas gambling addict, he only wants to talk about the deals he won.

If I were The Post, that’s the kind of writing I’d beg to have on my website, and in my newspaper. But it wasn’t there. Why?

“I’m happy to answer your question,” Post Business Editor Kristi Arellano emailed me yesterday. “But I’m afraid the answer won’t be nearly as interesting as you would like. We get Al Lewis’ column via email and it is manually dropped into our system and launched online by the editorial assistant in the business section. That individual was on vacation, and the column got overlooked. It was not an intentional decision. Rather, it was an unfortunate oversight caused by short-staffing.”

I told Arellano that, yes, if Lewis’ column had been spiked due to threatening calls from Coors, and intervention from Post Editor Greg Moore, it would have made a better blog post for me. (In fact, such questions about outside intervention were raised in 2010 when a Lewis column, telling the story of how John Elway called Lewis a “scumbag,” was not printed in The Post. Like Coors, Elway had also lost millions of dollars in a ponzi scheme. Here’s Westword blogger Michael Roberts’ 2010 account of this.)

In any case, I asked Arellano if she’d run the column, and she said she’d “circle back” and post it online, adding that the column “fell through the cracks–and that should not have happened.” I’ll update this blog post when the column appears online.