Diana DeGette is a true-blue liberal from what in the conventional wisdom has to be considered a solidly red state. And despite her reputation as a legislator who is particularly effective when her party is in the minority, it is easy to view the efforts of the Colorado Democrat as the pointless flailings of a politician with no real leverage. She is, after all, a Democrat in the GOP-led House of Representatives.
But DeGette, the four-term Democrat from Denver, is poking and prodding the White House on a couple of politically sensitive issues that could turn Colorado a little purple before the November election -- stem cell research and the environmental stewardship of the Bush Administration. These are the kind of issues that could hurt President Bush with independent voters, and there are a lot of them in Colorado. Ross Perot got 23 percent of the vote in 1992; Ralph Nader won five percent of the vote in 2000, as good a showing as he had anywhere in the country. Thirty-three percent of registered voters say they are independents.
It surprised a lot of people when the Kerry campaign included Colorado in its huge ad buy last week. Gore lost Colorado by nine percentage points. But this November, Colorado's ballot will include a very tight Senate race for an open seat in which polls show the Democrat, Ken Salazar, leading all the GOP prospects, as well as two close House races, one for an open seat and another in which the freshman GOP incumbent is defending a seat he won in 2002 with 47 percent of the vote.
Suddenly Colorado is in play, Democrats believe.
And so we had to take notice last week when DeGette, with a lot of help from Rep. Michael Castle, a Republican from Delaware, and California Republican Duke Cunningham, got 206 members of the House, including 36 Republicans, to sign a letter to President Bush criticizing his restrictive policy on stem cell research.
This is significant for two reasons: First, there is hard-wired partisanship on Capitol Hill that has completely annihilated any notion of a non-partisan issue. Second, the stem cell debate is closely tied to abortion, obviously the most volatile of all wedge issues; this is not the first place you might think to test the waters of bipartisanship. But we live for surprises in this town.
“I was amazed in election year we would get 206 signatures taking on the President,” DeGette said.
The letter calls on Bush to relax the rules that restrict medical research on human embryonic stem cells. The critics claim that the three-year ban is harming research and slowing the discovery of cures for a host of diseases, from childhood diabetes to Parkinson's to Alzheimer's. The current rules prohibit the use of federal funds for research on any stem cells from embryos destroyed after August 2001, severely limiting the number of cells available for federally funded research. The cells excluded from research are to be discarded.
Cunningham, a highly decorated fighter pilot who served in Vietnam, got teary-eyed at a press conference as he recalled a sick little girl who confronted him and pleaded with him to save her life. She died.
“The bottom line is, these cells are going to be thrown away," Cunningham said.
According to The Washington Post, a poll in the now-famous 18 swing states shows that two-thirds of those surveyed disagree with the Bush policy and would like it changed.
“This is not the issue that the White House should choose to politicize,” DeGette said, “It could hurt them with independent voters, but these are some of the extremist views that the White House has taken in regard to science.”
DeGette, who co-chairs the Kerry campaign in Colorado, says the Democrats would be mistaken to write off her state.
“This is a state where Democrats have won. [Clinton won in 1992, with Perot's help, although Bob Dole won by two points in 1996.] In the Congressional delegation we could got from 5-2 in favor of the Republicans to 4-3 in favor of the Democrats,” DeGette said, almost wistfully.
She is even more worked up about a plan by the Bureau of Land Management to sell oil and gas leases on about 75,000 acres of federal land in Colorado. The Administration will offer the leases for sale next week, a year after the BLM agreed to cap the expansion of wilderness, effectively opening up about 155 million acres in 10 states to drilling and other industrial purposes.
“This is just one of the many examples of the pitiful record that the Bush Administration has compiled on the environment,” DeGette said.
In the recent Kerry ads, he makes a point of saying that he was born in an Army Hospital in Colorado, where his father served in the Army Air Corps. DeGette says it is not by accident.
“I've been told by the Kerry campaign that he wants to win the state of his birth,” she said.
It never hurts to aim high. Mile High.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
