So now we know the answer to that oft-posed question: What if they held a Cory Gardner town hall and everyone but Cory Gardner showed?
OK, it wasn’t exactly headline news that Gardner ducked a packed Byers Middle School event. He ducked a similar one in Fort Collins the other night, and his office had said he wouldn’t be there. And let’s be honest, Gardner must be the least likely politician in America to voluntarily show up for a sure-to-be-confrontational night on the town.
That was the plan. Gardner would be invited. He wouldn’t show. The questions would be asked anyway.
Only a Cardboard Cutout Cory, all smiles, would be there to refuse to answer the questions, which, by the way, turned out to be almost uniformly well researched and on point.
This was Trump-era political theater, harkening back to old-school guerrilla theater. You’ll see more of this (and, just guessing, even less of Gardner) as TrumpWorld continues to be all a-wobble.
But if the point of the empty-chair town hall was to embarrass no-show Gardner, I’m guessing it was a failure. This is no fault of the organizers or of the questions asked or of empty-chair-pioneer Clint Eastwood. The organizers ran a very interesting show, which included a shoutout to journalists, otherwise known as enemies of the people. The crowd went nuts. Who could ask for more than that?
The thing about Gardner – and what makes him the politician that he is – is that he can’t be embarrassed. He’s the master of blush-free politics.
If you can trap Gardner and get him to take a tough question, he will dodge with impunity, as he did Friday with Joe St. George, of Fox 31 Denver. St. George asked him four times whether he would hold a town hall as protesters were demanding. And four times Gardner refused to answer the question. It was vintage Cory – all obfuscation, all the time.
We can take pride in the nonalternative fact that the whole GOP duck-and-cover-town-hall phenomenon basically began in Colorado. It was Mike Coffman, you’ll recall, who was caught on video sneaking out of a meeting with constituents, sounding a very un-Marine-like retreat. The 9News video went viral, and nothing has been the same since.
Most Republicans, including Coffman, took the lesson to heart and simply stopped doing town halls, replacing them with what they call tele-town halls, which are working out about as well as repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas showed how badly it’s going. He said he wasn’t holding town halls because of dangerous protesters, citing the shooting of Gabby Giffords at her 2011 “Congress on Your Corner” meeting.
Giffords, a Democrat who didn’t appreciate Gohmert’s sympathy, hit back hard, saying that town-hall dodgers should show some “courage” while noting that “I was shot on a Saturday morning. By Monday morning, my offices were open to the public.”
Meanwhile, Gardner has spent his week in Colorado pretending to meet the people and sending out tweets and news releases about his meetings, headlined like this one: Gardner Meets Coloradans Along the Front Range. He did meet Coloradans, just select Coloradans, like the Colorado Space Coaltion and MillersCoors employees and a friendly crowd at an agriculture forum. You get the idea.
In Gardner’s defense – well, not really, but sort of – he’s in a fix. And the only way to make things right would be to go completely honest. In other words, he has no way out.
You’ll remember that Gardner slammed Trump during the primary season while serving as a Marco Rubio surrogate. Then there was the twitter war over the GOP caucuses. And, finally, during the general election, there was the, uh, groping video which so offended Gardner – and the pollsters – that Gardner said Trump should step aside and that, if he didn’t, he would write in Mike Pence.
This was a rare piece of Gardner boldness, and I think we know the lesson he learned – right after going with the GOP-sanctioned attack that protesters were being paid. Which was to make as few stands as possible.
Since Trump has been elected, Gardner has voted 100 percent with him. Of course, so have 47 other Republicans. He has criticized Trump on relations with Russia, but not very loudly and not so you’d really notice.
What he hasn’t said, of course, is that Trump lies constantly, that he’s a bully and a demagogue, that Steve Bannon is too dangerous to be anywhere near the White House, that the press isn’t, in fact, an enemy of the people.
If you like political theater, and I know I do, this is just the first act.
Mike Littwin is a longtime Colorado journalist and a columnist for The Colorado Independent. Reach him at mlittwin@coloradoindependent.com. This column can be found at www.coloradoindependent.com.
