Verbal Construction

Michael Hancock or Chris Romer for Mayor?

One candidate stands for sincere but blandly vacant caring about Denver, more maneuvering to get city hall’s hands on the assets of Denver Public Schools, more catering to real-estate developers, more ceding of public space and public money to private interests, continued secrecy at Denver Water, continued multimillion-dollar slush at DIA, and poignant self-congratulation.

The other candidate represents exactly the same interests.

Cynical of me to say? No, this has been city hall’s atmosphere for the past several decades. You know what’s cynical? Candidates who shiv each other and magnify irrelevant minutiae as if offering meaningful choices to Denver voters.

I plan to vote for Hancock because he’s not a Wall Street financial wizard, and Romer is…in the great, public-spirited tradition of JPMorgan banksters. Sorry to reduce the race to this one fact. To me it’s the only salient difference between the candidates.

Elsewhere on the ballot, the Second Rule of Denver Politics continues to operate. What rule? Jan Tyler. Marcia Johnson. Sandy Adams. Susan Rogers. Stephanie O’Malley. See the pattern? Over the past decade or so, Denver voters chose these people to oversee city elections.

The Clerk candidates who made it to the run-off also fit the pattern: Sarah McCarthy and Debra Johnson. Despite being popular and having an impressive roster of endorsements, Tom Downey finished third. Why? Because of the Second Rule: Denver voters consistently, unconsciously prefer women with anglophilic-sounding names in the role of Election Commissioner/Clerk.

The First Rule of Denver Politics: City hall is married to you but involved in a torrid affair with real-estate developers. You feel empty and dirty and you don’t know why. When you ask to see phone records, for instance, you’re told that Denver is exempt from the Colorado Open Records Act, and you need to be more trusting. Maybe you should sign up for a pottery class.

Ballots for the run-off election must be returned by June 7.

I sat around a table recently with friends despondent about Denver’s upcoming mayoral election. We despaired that the top candidates are awful.

The easiest candidate to reject is former State Senator Chris Romer. He’s the one with the most campaign cash, and the favorite among Denver’s elite. He was also JPMorgan’s lead banker on the questionable municipal bond deals that led New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson to withdraw from Obama cabinet consideration.

Some say Romer was involved in this, too: Exotic Deals Put Denver Schools Deeper in Debt. Do I want a Bankster for mayor? Under no circumstances.

I’m crossing the three city councilors — Carol Boigon, Michael Hancock, and Doug Linkhart — off the list.

Everything wrong with Denver is exemplified by city council. I’ll give you one recent example. Denver is facing a significant budget deficit for the fourth
year in a row, something in the range of $100 million. The city’s so-called leaders talk in grave tones about raising taxes while cutting workers, pensions, libraries, and services.

So, naturally, city council just voted to give $850,000 in corporate welfare to
multi-billion-dollar DaVita, Inc. Yes, DaVita! Renowned for intimidating
competitors with lawsuits, all to dominate the kidney dialysis market.

Jeanne Faatz was the only councilor who opposed the bill on first reading. She
condemned the measure as welfare for a corporation that doesn’t need the money. There’s something rotten in the souls of Denver Democrats when the only politician who pushes back on corporate giveaways also happens to be the only Republican in the room.

Boigon, Linkhart, and Hancock all voted to give DaVita a handout. So when they talk about “hard choices” facing the next mayor, think about DaVita and wonder what “hard choice” they made with their votes.

Of course, they’ll say they did it to create jobs. That’s what they say when they spend our money — as when Boigon wrangled the votes to pass a $2.6 million budget increase for employee raises for 2008. Jobs! Or when Linkhart held backroom meetings with union leaders. Jobs!

For the past eight years these three candidates have made “hard choices” and created “jobs” on city council. Yet Denver is in an ever-deepening hole. So how much confidence can you have in their ability to run the city?

Lots of people seem to love James Mejia, especially around Sloan’s Lake where he’s winning the battle of the yard signs. He claims credit for the Justice Center, but questions have been raised (here, for example) about how “on time and on budget” the project really was. What distinguishes him from any other lifetime insider/employee? So far, all I see is the meh in Mejia.

Danny Lopez, Jeff Peckman, Ken Simpson, Thomas Andrew Wolf. I’m focusing on serious candidates, so these guys are off the list.

That leaves Theresa Spahn. (Also known as, Who?) She’s a lawyer and an advocate for women and children. She has a record of community leadership but she isn’t a city hall insider. To me, that makes her the most credible and qualified candidate.

Process of elimination. The election is May 3.

I received this message from Denver historian and author Phil Goodstein:

John Davoren died on election day, Tuesday, November 2, 2010.  He was a North Denver boy who grew up in Berkeley and attended Holy Family School and Regis High School.  After working as a wire-service reporter and television news writer, he worked for the Farmers’ Union.  At one time, it was a most powerful force of liberal, small farmers.  On this basis, he gained three terms as a New Deal Democrat in the General Assembly in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Davoren was among the few elected officials in the area to openly oppose DIA.

John was from an old Denver political family.  His grandfather was Democratic Party chairman in the early 20th century when Robert Speer built his Big Mitt political machine.  I mentioned this link in passing in my book Robert Speer’s Denver.  He was glad anybody remembered William Davoren.  On this basis, we got acquainted.  He started attending Naysayer meetings at a time we usually only had two or three people.  Along the way, he served as a publicist for my books.  As a proofreader/editor, he saved me from some major blunders.  I dedicated my From Soup Lines to the Front Lines to him — he is the person who came up with the title.

Right as I was researching my new book on North Denver, I discovered he was a correspondent of Spider Man!  His father had known Spider Man since the day when Spider Man, Theodore Coneys, had worked for John’s grandfather as a bookkeeper.  After Coneys got life [in prison], John’s father was his only outside contact.  When his father died in the late 1950s, John kept the correspondence alive for a few years.  In the 1960s, they lost contact.  When Coneys was offered parole about this time, he declined:  he did not know anybody outside.

When I last talked to John about 10 days before his death, we joked that John, in his modern home in Adams County, did not have space in the attic for Spider Man.

“Spider Man” was so named because he lived secretly in the North Denver attic of the man he was convicted of murdering, and continued to live there undiscovered for a while after the murder.

I met John at a Naysayer gathering a couple of years ago. Over several months he had lost a lot of weight. We asked him about it. John said that he had lost 100 pounds over the course of a year by making a sign that read: “DESDM.” He said that he looked at the sign daily, and it worked.

“What is DESDM?” several of us asked.

John said: “Don’t Eat So Damn Much.”

Pulling our legs, of course. I will miss John’s smile and his good humor.  UPDATE: Denver Post obit here. John’s memorial page here.