Tag Archives: Ken Buck

In retrospect, Ken Buck (and Cory Gardner) held the key to it all

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Back in February, I wrote a lengthy post seriously questioning an article in The Atlantic that suggested Colorado was the harbinger of the year to come for Democrats, as failed and notably abrasive 2010 Republican nominee Ken Buck agreed to drop out of the Senate race there in favor of Congressman Cory Gardner, the more moderate and affable establishment pick. That article basically asserted that this proved that Republicans had gotten their act together on the Senate side after major flubs cost them Senate control in 2010 and 2012.

Tonight, Ken Buck is a Congressman-elect in Gardner’s old seat (the only part I predicted correctly) and Cory Gardner is a Senator-elect, having defeated Sen. Udall in a race that I wasn’t even seriously putting on the map until this summer. It looks like Republicans will end up winning more than they need (possibly quite a bit more — it’s been a bad night) to capture the Senate, but they’ve definitely crossed the line at this point. And Gardner was a major factor in that, both dismantling what could have been an easy hold for Democrats with somebody like Buck running again and ensuring that Republicans had extra paths to victory while Democrats had extra states to defend. Gardner becoming the clear favorite in the last month basically made it obvious that Democrats were going to lose at least seven seats for sure (the fallback magic number to flip control even if Republicans choked in Kansas), almost certainly one or two more, and quite possibly more beyond that. In the end, when all is said and done (after Alaska comes in and after Louisiana’s runoff, if they don’t beat expectations at this point), Democrats are about to have lost 9 Senate seats and won none.

Even with recruits like Scott Brown proving to be duds (New Hampshire) or “offbeat” Joni Ernst beating expectations (Iowa), getting people like Ken Buck to step aside in Colorado and nominating non-fringe candidates via primary in places like North Carolina are a big reason why Republicans had a pretty easy time winning the Senate tonight. And they also very nearly won a surprise bonus seat in Virginia by nominating Ed Gillespie, a moderate Beltway Republican with extensive fundraising capabilities, to challenge Sen. Mark Warner even when it looked for much of the year like Warner might be re-elected by double digits (and not the 0.5% margin he’s currently on track to win). That’s definitely not what I was expecting in February when I wrote (in the same post) “…Virginia Republicans getting behind Ed Gillespie won’t prove much of anything since the Democrats will still win handily there.”

Which is not to say any of these winners are genuinely moderate. But they certainly talk the talk convincingly enough to not giftwrap unforced errors to embattled Democrats all over the place for a third cycle in a row.

This was always a tough year for Senate Dems with a very strong GOP advantage built in from early on in 2014, but it was not clear it would be a lock as things developed. In the end, though, Ken Buck and Cory Gardner making a smooth switcheroo in Colorado back in February was one of the major tipping points after all for Senate control. I sure didn’t see that coming. Maybe in 2015 I’ll stick to picking out minor global news stories before they become huge headlines, because I did pretty well on that front this year.

flag-of-colorado

Does Ken Buck dropping Senate bid mean much?

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In a changeup that The Atlantic’s Molly Ball argued is “definitive proof” (as the headline writers put it anyway) that the Republican Party establishment is “getting their act together” finally against the tea party insurgents, 2010 US Senate nominee Ken Buck has dropped out of this year’s Colorado Senate primary in favor of seeking the seat of U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, who just announced he would seek the Senate seat himself. Buck, as previously covered here, is a very conservative (and very loathsome) Republican, who was the perceived frontrunner for the 2014 nomination.

I think it’s probably very premature to drop the victory balloons for Gardner, since even if nominated he’s still got an uphill battle against incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Udall, but I can see Ball’s point. If rock-solid tea party champion Ken Buck — who was already jeopardizing GOP chances of a pickup once again — can be persuaded to drop out in favor of Gardner, that would seem to be a worrying sign for Democrats who have been counting on Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot (as discussed on AFD Episode 74 this week) as the core strategy for retaining tough-to-hold seats in the Senate.

Competitive and non-competitive 2014 Senate races. (Credit: Orser67 - Wikipedia) Competitive and non-competitive 2014 Senate races. (Credit: Orser67 – Wikipedia)

That said, the examples given in The Atlantic article of establishment Republicans outmaneuvering right-wing challenges this year were in non-battleground Senate races: Texas and Wyoming, which Democrats weren’t going to win anyway this year.

Other examples we’ve seen this year like Virginia Republicans getting behind Ed Gillespie won’t prove much of anything since the Democrats will still win handily there. So I think it’s still too early to be writing trend pieces on this idea.
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Colorado: The return of Ken Buck

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Hey, will you look at that: Failed 2010 Republican Senate nominee for Colorado, Ken Buck, is back again to seek the state’s other seat in 2014. He’s off to a very strong start with a puzzling (yet, predictably offensive) comparison between a woman’s pregnancy and his experience battling cancer, as a way to express his opposition to a woman having a say in her personal health.

Yes, I am pro-life. While I understand a woman wants to be in control of her body — it’s certainly the feeling that I had when I was a cancer patient, I wanted to be in control of the decisions that were made concerning my body — there is another fundamental issue at stake. And that’s the life of the unborn child.

 
This dismissive attitude toward women’s decision-making abilities is absolutely in line with his past views from the 2010 cycle. It also reminds us of his “prosecutor’s discretion” decision not to charge a rapist on the horrid “grounds” that the survivor, who had been asleep, must have just made a bad call and regretted it, even though the rapist also admitted lack of consent. (More on that here.)

That all added up to Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund dropping over $800k in Colorado to run this ad in October 2010…

If Ken Buck wins the GOP nomination in Colorado, that’s probably for the best from a Democratic perspective, given that anti-woman comments like this latest cancer comparison were what helped him lose an easy race to an unelected no-name appointee. Here’s the text from my 11/3/10 post at Starboard Broadside:

Against the odds, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Col., appointed 2009) has pulled off an upset to win his bid for a six-year term against DA Ken Buck, the tea-party favorite who had led the former Denver Public Schools superintendent for months in the polling. The Associated Press has called the race for Bennet with 97.2% of the vote reported, as Bennet leads by 15,444 votes. Buck has not conceded yet.

Bennet began pulling even in recent weeks as more revelations about Buck’s views on rape, abortion, and women came to light. Bennet’s hard-hitting response combined with independent expenditures against Buck by women’s groups helped derail Buck’s campaign. This was a critical hold for Democrats, as in nearby Nevada, where Harry Reid also won a major upset to retain his seat. On a night where the Democrats lost Obama’s old seat in Illinois, it would have been yet another embarrassment for the President to lose Colorado, since Bennet only occupies the seat because President Obama appointed Sen. Ken Salazar (D) to serve as Interior Secretary in his administration.

 

This time, if nominated again, Buck would be up against an elected incumbent with very high name recognition — Senator Mark Udall.

Oh, and I haven’t even gotten into Ken Buck’s views on education. But I guess I have to end this post somewhere before it just becomes an exercise in telling someone about that nightmare you had last night.

This is misogyny.

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What’s the function of a district attorney? Because I’m really naive. I had some silly ideas about them enforcing the law and providing justice and representing the oppressed. And I know I’m an idealist, but THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD WORK.

In my crazy pipe-dream of a world, a rape survivor could go into the DA’s office, list the facts, say, “Let’s take this criminal down,” and get a “Heck yeah!” of agreement from the DA.

But prosecuting rape is absurd to Ken Buck, who is running for senator for Colorado (guess which party!).

In 2005, while serving as District Attorney for Weld County, Buck shot down a rape survivor’s request to prosecute her attacker. But it did not go undocumented; she taped the interaction. Even though the record showed that she was asleep when raped, and that her attacker admitted she’d said no, Buck claimed, “you never said the word yes, but the appearance is of consent.”

Later in the discussion, he declares:

There is contradictory evidence over consent. The act of inviting him, appear to be consensual acts, then there are statements that appear to be indicate that there wasn’t consent. That conflict is the conflict that doesn’t give us the proof beyond reasonable doubt.

 
Let’s make something clear. There’s no such thing as “contradictory evidence” over consent. If someone says no, it’s rape. It doesn’t matter if they were invited in. It doesn’t matter if the two people dated earlier. It doesn’t matter if they made out. No means no. And if it’s not an enthusiastic “Yes!” then you STILL might want to look over what the situation is.

And having sex with someone who’s unconscious is pretty unequivocal rape even by society’s ridiculous victim-blaming standards.

Yeah, um, Colorado… can you NOT elect this guy? Please?

This post was originally published on Starboard Broadside.

Federal Intervention

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One of the more popular stances this election cycle for teabagger candidates to take has been to openly call for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education. All the mainstream people I talk to seem totally confused as to why this would be necessary or a good idea. The short explanation is that this is a logical extension of the States’ Rights Conservatism that had sort of gone underground for a couple decades.

Via DailyKos, Ken Buck, Republican U.S. Senate nominee from Colorado, adopted the anti-Department of Education position, too, although not very gracefully. While there are real and serious problems with education in America today, the educational system is much improved over what it used to be. Ken Buck, however, falls into the “Back in the Day” trap, wherein a person is convinced that everything was significantly better before and has gone to hell now, and the explanation he sees is the increased Federal involvement in education.

In what was either a very unfortunate slip of the tongue or an intentional historical allusion, he identified the 1950s — at least twenty years prior to the establishment of the Department of Education — as the decade when Federal involvement in education began a long decline (as he perceives it) toward the reduced standards, poor graduation rates, and other problems he sees in our current education system nationally… From ColoradoPols (emphasis from the source, video available there):

Question: [brief lead-in] What plans do you have to make public education better in America?

Buck: “Let’s talk about that [education] folks. In the 1950s, we had the best schools in the world. And the United States government decided to get more involved in federal education. Where are we now, after all those years of federal involvement, are we better or are we worse? So what’s the federal government’s answer? Well since we’ve made education worse, we’re gonna even get more involved. And what’s gonna be the result? It’s kinda like health care. We’ve screwed up health care–Medicare–we’ve screwed up all kinds of other things, so what are we gonna do? We’re gonna get even more involved in health care. What are we going to do? We’re gonna get more involved in education.

 
Again, there are many, many problems with that entire answer, including that our education system actually sucked by and large in the 1950s and was not the best in the world. But the bolding is what most interests us. It’s possible he just grabbed that decade randomly or accidentally, but it seems unlikely. Presumably he had a reason to choose to cite it, and that reason is what we should establish.

As you might have worked out by now, the only really noteworthy, historic, and well-known times the “United States government decided to get more involved in Federal education,” during the 1950s was in desegregation-related episodes: Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Federal intervention of U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division paratroopers in Little Rock to integrate Central High School in 1958.

Actual Federal education/curriculum type programs didn’t really start until the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in the 1960s. And even most of those small early programs like the Presidential Phyiscal Fitness Award could hardly be credited with launching the decline of Western Civilization American public education. If you’re talking about “Federal involvement” in education before the 1960s, you’re pretty much only talking about integration.

So what exactly did Ken Buck mean when he blamed Federal involvement in the schools beginning in the 1950s to a decline he perceives in our education system? Does he think government-enforced integration was bad? It’s a fair question, given a similar position from Republican US Senate nominee from Kentucky, Rand Paul, on desegregation.

 
This post was originally published at Starboard Broadside.