“Appealing, Not Appalling”: George Will Column on Joe O’Dea

“O’Dea, 60, is challenging Sen. Michael Bennet, 57, a two-term Democratic incumbent. Their contest underscores their parties’ current profiles.

“Bennet’s father, whose family arrived on the Mayflower, was a diplomat, senior State Department official for presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and — you will murmur 'of course' — president of National Public Radio. Bennet’s mother survived the Holocaust, as did her parents. Bennet himself attended Washington’s toney St. Albans School and moved to Colorado after Yale Law School and a stint at a premier Washington law firm (Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr). In Denver, he became wealthy working for billionaire investor Philip Anschutz, was appointed city schools superintendent, then in 2009 was appointed to complete the term of a senator who joined President Barack Obama’s Cabinet.

“O’Dea, a fourth-generation Coloradan married to the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, was adopted at birth into a Denver police officer’s family. To help pay his Catholic-school tuition, O’Dea washed dishes at a pizza restaurant until he was promoted to kneading the dough, which required him to rise, like the dough, at 2:30 a.m. Impatient to start a business — installing attic fans in houses without air conditioning — from his basement, he left Colorado State University three credits short of graduation. His construction company now has 300 employees, 80 percent of them Hispanics, and specializes in large civil engineering projects. He has prospered enough to sink $2 million in his Senate campaign.

“But the crucial financial contribution to his political campaign was the perhaps $10 million that Democrats spent trying to manipulate voters into nominating one of O’Dea’s rivals in the Republican primary. Democrats spent that money on ads cynically attempting to help a fire-breathing 'stop the steal' state legislator who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Democratic-funded ads labeled him 'too conservative for Colorado,' hoping to kindle conservatives’ enthusiasm for him. And Democrats tried to wound O’Dea by praising him as a 'moderate,' an epithet among fans of the firebreather.

“The Democrats’ attempt to stampede conservatives into supporting a weak general-election candidate backfired. Colorado has open primaries, and unaffiliated voters, who are 45 percent of Colorado’s electorate, stampeded toward O’Dea. Now Democrats, having tried to stigmatize O’Dea as a moderate, must pivot to claiming he is MAGA extremist.

…

“O’Dea’s candidacy, in a purple state trending blue (Colorado has voted Republican in presidential politics only twice in this century’s six elections), tests many Coloradans’ often professed disdain for both parties. If voters embrace O’Dea’s temperate conservatism, they willencourage Republicans elsewhere to emulate his declaration of independence from their most recent presidential candidate’s whining about imagined 2020 grievances. So, Coloradans have the nation’s political healing in their hands.”