After avoiding her once-signature issue for most of her third term in Congress, Marilyn Musgrave stepped back into the debate over gay marriage in recent weeks by signing on as a co-sponsor of constitutional amendments to define marriage as between a man and a woman.
Is there a competent politician in the Colorado GOP? Anyone? Bueller? I think ColoradoPols analysis of this is spot on,
Our view: this is a huge mistake for Marilyn Musgrave, and for more than the obvious reasons: in addition to opening herself--again--to the charge of being fixated on meaningless wedge issues while her constituents deal with far more pressing economic concerns, any fleeting chance that wealthy Democrat donors might focus their attention elsewhere in acknowledgment of her "revamped image"...just vanished. Musgrave is once again Tim Gill's Public Enemy #1.
Nobody had any delusions that Musgrave's position on gays or other socially divisive issues which have stigmatized her throughout her career had really changed, but we honestly thought she would try to get through the '08 election cycle without bringing it up. It would have been the smarter choice, and consistent with all the work she's done since '06 to rebrand herself--unless this article's speculation is correct and the numbers are so bad for her that even her core base of GOP support is jeopardized. In that case, it does make a desperate kind of sense.
Musgrave must be absolutely tanking to throw a hailmary like this in late June. She's an incumbent 4 months out from the election who has spent the better part of 2 years remaking herself as a moderate concerned about the bread and butter issues of her constituents. Why make a hard-right turn now unless your numbers are in the toilet?
1 comment:
Why does it always have to be about politics? Can't decisions like that be made on principles?
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