Article Contributed on: 6/30/2009 8:58:00 AM
I left the Democratic Party in 2001 but they still send me fundraising letters, in recent years emails. Today I was the amused recipient of the latest pitch from the Guv as he solicits funds for his 2010 re-election bid.
"Our June 30 fundraising report will show the pundits, the press, and our opponents what we're made of. It will show them whether or not Coloradans support our forward-thinking approach, which puts people before politics," says Mr. Ritter or his ghost writer, demonstrating the tin ear that sets the Democrats in general and Bill Ritter in particular apart from the great orators of American political history.
The above contains a fallacy every fourth word or so, but the most egregious is the suggestion that the Ritter administration has put
people before politics (at least, in the conventional meaning of the phrase). Despite some hopeful rhetoric early on in the term, the dominant theme of the Ritter administration
in practice has been
prisons before people.
I believe Mr. Ritter has good intentions. He does, however, have a track record of not living up to his good intentions. In his early days as District Attorney of Denver Ritter changed from defender of the people against excessive use of force by the police to apologist for and abetter of excessive force. In his term as governor, Ritter has gone from calling for sentencing reform and closure of prisons to vetoing sentencing reform and sacrificing education funds to the insatiable appetite of the Prisonocracy.
It's darned expensive running a police state, and it's darned expensive running a gubernatorial campaign. There's a connection there somewhere. I'm not sure I can define that connection, but Ritter's campaign email today brought it a little more into focus.