His staff waited to begin a morning meeting at a giant conference table nearby as Gov. John Hickenlooper pawed through his cluttered desk. Then he found it, a $60 DNA test that figured out all the breeds in his dog, Sky, the black-and-brown pooch dealing wet licks to strangers for head rubs and chin scratches.
After the meeting, before anybody left his office, Hickenlooper showed off Sky’s one trick, staying put until he called, which seemed more the dog’s idea than his.
“It really lowers the tension in here to have her around sometimes,” Hickenlooper said of the former stray from the streets of Fort Collins. “When we were doing the oil and gas deal, she was great.”
In Hickenlooper, a different kind of political animal, it was perfectly conventional for this unconventional leader to bring a fun-loving dog to the tense bargaining between opponents and supporters of the oil and gas industry.
The result: a task force made up of opponents, supporters, government and business to look for common ground on regulations for the thousands of oil and gas rigs piercing and pumping Colorado for fuel.
Compromise is the word that sums up Colorado’s 42nd and possibly most likable governor, but one that’s made him an easy caricature as indecisive when he’s seeking middle ground.
Hickenlooper hasn’t changed despite polls that show him to be in the fight of his political life as Democrats nationally face a tough election year. Hickenlooper, however, is stumbling over the very nonpolitical characteristics that once endeared him to voters.
“That has always worked for him, always served him well, until the last couple of years,” said Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.
“He’s governed as a consensus-builder who gets things done, kind of above the political fray, which voters tend to like, but that does leave you open to people saying you’re not a strong leader, you’re unable to make a decision, the kinds of things he’s hearing.
“But I think that style of governing is who he is, so it would be difficult for him to change.”
The perils of consensus
In his first term, Hickenlooper’s political mandate was to recharge the state’s post-recession economy. At the same time Colorado weathered a series of natural disasters on top of tragedies of violence — the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, followed by the assassination of his state prisons chief in March 2013 and the shooting death of student Claire Davis and the suicide of her assailant, Karl Pierson, at Arapahoe High before last Christmas.
Also in 2012, Colorado had 4,167 fires that caused $538 million in damage, claiming six lives. Three people died in the Lower North Fork fire, which started when state forestry workers lost control of a fire set and meant to burn off excess fuel and help prevent fires.
In 2013, the Black Forest fire burned more than 14,000 acres northeast of Colorado Springs, causing two deaths and consuming 486 homes.
Three months later, nine people died in one of the worst floods in Colorado history. Four days of rain destroyed more than 1,800 homes and other structures, left at least 18,000 homeless and closed about 500 miles of roads. Altogether, the northern Front Range and northeast plains sustained an estimated $2.9 billion in damage.
Hickenlooper was a common sight in the days after, hunched over crutches after hip replacement surgery.
Now uncertainty looms large over his political future just two years after polling indicated he was the nation’s second-most-popular governor and Esquire magazine named Hickenlooper one of its “Americans of the Year.”
He was talked about as a potential pick for vice president in 2016.
A second term began a slide toward doubt with the unpopularity of gun-control legislation he signed into law in March 2013, eight months to the day after the Aurora theater massacre.
A Quinnipiac University poll last year indicated state residents opposed new gun laws overall but were generally in favor of the two main changes — a 15-round limit on gun magazines and mandatory background checks.
But the measures still created a political nightmare, costing three Democratic legislators their jobs, including two successful recalls and another who stepped down ahead of a recall.
The day before, the governor undercut efforts by Democratic legislators to do away with the state’s death penalty, and two months later he granted an unusual “temporary reprieve” to death-row inmate Nathan Dunlap in a state where a Denver Post poll this month indicated voters support capital punishment more than 2-to-1.
Hickenlooper said the next governor could decide Dunlap’s ultimate fate, while the public figures out where the state should stand on capital punishment. He supported the death penalty running for governor four years ago but opposes it now, leaving him in a vague center of a divisive issue.
Hickenlooper compounded his political problems in a meeting with the state’s sheriffs last June, when he appeared to retreat from those gun laws he signed, saying he would have urged legislators to slow down on the issue had he known the massively divisive issue would divide the state.
His remarks, recorded without his knowledge, turned out to be laden with election-year ammunition for his adversaries. Even his usual allies said he should have known better, given that 55 of the state’s 62 sheriffs are Republicans and most of them were part of an unsuccessful lawsuit to undo the gun laws.
“Traditional political advice would be that if people are upset with you, especially in a political year, steer around them,” said the governor, a former brewpub operator, sitting at the conference table for an interview this month.
“I just, well, I’m from the restaurant business, and I still look at it as, ‘We’re all on the same team. We’re all trying to make Colorado safer, better, more successful.’ So I go to them and try to give nuanced answers to things that it would probably take smaller groups to be able to explain.”
His collaborations paid off in other areas, including disaster recovery, economic development and the compromise on fracking.
“Together is the Colorado way,” he said in his debate with Republican nominee Bob Beauprez in Grand Junction on Aug. 30.
Hickenlooper’s economic plan, Colorado Blueprint, for example, divided the state into 14 regions and asked residents and leaders in each one to come up with economic priorities and strategies. The plan’s subtitle is “A Bottom-Up Approach to Economic Development.”
The governor credits the plan with giving Colorado one of the top state economies in the nation, outpacing expectations again in 2014.
The business of politics
The rise of Hickenlooper has been a well-told story over his 11 years in public office. He was a laid-off petroleum company geologist in his 30s in the late 1980s when he scraped up some cash to start the state’s first brewpub.
His trailblazing in the bar business gave rise not only to an industry that today includes more than 200 brewpubs statewide but also revitalized downtrodden LoDo as a vibrant destination for libations.
His entrepreneurship was his springboard into the Denver mayor’s seat in 2003, which then bounced him into the governor’s office in 2010.
Hickenlooper’s first TV ad for his re-election was titled ” Restaurant” and depicted him waiting on customers in his first business, the Wynkoop Brewing Co., which he sold in 2007.
“If you’re a good restaurant operator, you’re not a dictator,” Hickenlooper said during a reception for members of his fracking task force at the Governor’s Residence. “You work with your managers, and you’ve got partners. The most successful small businesses are collaborative.
“In a small business, you learn there’s no margin in having enemies.”
Hickenlooper demonstrated that early on, by helping his competitors who together helped revitalize LoDo, which let everyone profit.
Dave Query, the chef who owns Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar, said his was one of the first destination restaurants to open in LoDo — eight years after the Wynkoop.
Hickenlooper hung up a flier for Jax in his bar and encouraged people to try out his competitor a few blocks away.
“He saw early on that having a lot of good things going on around his business would help his business,” Query said.
Governor’s alliances
Hickenlooper’s chief strategist, Alan Salazar, a veteran Democratic adviser to governors and U.S. senators, describes Hickenlooper — jokingly — as the first Republican he’s ever worked for, because he bucks Democrats and loves business.
“I like to say he doesn’t ride the big donkey,” said Salazar, referring to the party’s mascot.
Among his Cabinet and advisers, the governor has several Republicans. Those who have worked with him say Hickenlooper is all about solving problems with little regard for party politics.
This month, he held a news conference at the Capitol to announce a new website, BuildColorado.com, to connect job-seekers with skilled positions in the construction industry.
Michael Gifford, president of Associated General Contractors of Colorado, said afterward that Hickenlooper has been a terrific ally, despite a predominantly Republican membership.
Gifford said that when his and other groups put forth solid ideas on economic development, “he’s very good at working with those private plans and closing the deal, bringing companies to the state.”
Frank McNulty, the Republican speaker of the state House during Hickenlooper’s first two years as governor, said Hickenlooper likes to let others do the political dirty work, then blesses the compromise.
During first half of Hickenlooper’s first term, with a Democratic majority in the Senate and GOP-led House, any bill that made it to the governor’s desk had to be bipartisan to get that far, McNulty said. That spared the governor criticism.
When Democrats had control of both chambers the last two years, they pushed the agenda to the left — civil unions, gun regulations, changes to election laws among them — and Hickenlooper had to try to restrain his own party while absorbing the fallout from the right.
“In my experience, he is willing to seek compromise when it’s easy, but he’s not willing to expend his political capital when it’s hard,” McNulty said.
Friends and votes
In August, Hickenlooper held a rally for Latino supporters in Commerce City. It occurred as President Barack Obama’s stalled efforts over immigration and his handling of the crisis over undocumented children detained at the Texas border were hurting Democrats’ standing with Hispanic voters, polls showed.
Hickenlooper also ran afoul of some Latino activists in Colorado this month over the troubled new driver’s license program for those in the country illegally. The activists protested, saying the state isn’t putting in enough resources to make the program work.
That’s important because Latino voters, who make up 15 percent of the state’s electorate, supported Obama more than 3-to-1 two years ago, according to a New York Times analysis.
Guillermo Serna of Commerce City, a community activist in Colorado since 1972, said at the rally that Hickenlooper has advanced causes that benefit Latinos, such as providing in-state college tuition for children brought to the country illegally who qualify. Hickenlooper signed such a bill into law in 2013.
“His participation right now is in looking at what our state legislature is willing to go forth with,” Serna said. “If they don’t move it, he can’t sign it.”
Another constituency Hickenlooper needs is in rural Colorado.
On a campaign swing through southeast Colorado in August, the governor stopped at Knapp’s Farm Market in Rocky Ford.
Owner Chris Knapp said the governor made friends in the melon belt after a listeria outbreak in 2011 that sickened 147 people in 28 states and was linked to 37 deaths. All the tainted melons came from one farm but threatened the reputation of all Rocky Ford’s growers.
The farmers had no money or skill for public relations, so Hickenlooper met personally with the grocery executives to figure out a campaign.
“It was in their financial interest, too, to get the word out that these are still good melons,” Hickenlooper said.
The governor declared a statewide Rocky Ford Cantaloupe Day in August 2012.
“He and Mr. (John) Salazar at the Department of Agriculture did a lot for us in Rocky Ford,” Knapp said.
But was it enough to make Knapp, a registered Republican, vote for Hickenlooper?
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
A governor in crisis
In the aftermath of the midnight movie theater shooting that left 12 dead and 70 more injured, Hickenlooper’s chief of staff, Roxane White, had the job of telling him.
“I said, ‘John, this has happened, and I don’t know where my two sons are, and we’re mobilizing resources, but I have to find my kids,’ ” White recalled, emotion welling up in her voice. Her two sons had gone to a different movie that night and didn’t immediately see a text message from their mom.
Hickenlooper took on her job as well as his.
He told White to have public safety officials deal directly with him and ordered her to ” ‘Go find your kids. Don’t call me back until you’ve found your kids,’ ” she recalled him saying.
After the chief of Colorado prisons, Tom Clements, was gunned down in the front door of his Monument home, Hickenlooper’s first concern was protecting others who might be targets, White said, but also that someone from state leadership go immediately to comfort Clements’ family.
White said the one thing most people don’t understand about the governor is the depth of his commitment to his 12-year-old son, Teddy, and to other families.
Hickenlooper’s marriage, to writer Helen Thorpe, ended after 10 years in an “amicable separation,” and they remain good friends, White said. He was in attendance at her signing for her new book, “Soldier Girls: the Battles of Three Women at Home and at War,” in Denver in August.
At his staff meeting, the morning his dog was holding court, Hickenlooper was reminded Teddy had a baseball game coming up, so his staff would keep his schedule clear for it. Hickenlooper told his scheduler to block out a little more time, so he and Teddy could take some practice swings at a batting cage.
The political put-downs don’t bother him, Hickenlooper said at the Governor’s Residence that evening, except when his son hears them.
Hickenlooper was 7 when his father died from intestinal cancer. In talking about what he and the state have been through the past four years, he thinks of his mother’s strength of character while she comforted his father to the end and raised her family alone.
“The hardest part is trying to figure out what will make people feel even just a little bit better,” he said. “Oftentimes when people go through this, they feel so isolated and alone, so how do you connect that you understand at least a little what they’re going through.
“And you do get better at it.”
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joeybunch
Democrat john hickenlooper
Age: 62
Family: Son, Teddy
Religion: Quaker
Political history: Mayor of Denver 2003 to 2010; governor 2010 to present;
Key Endorsements: Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, AFL-CIO of Colorado, New Belgium Brewing Company co-founder and CEO Kim Jordan, Maria Gonzalez, President and CEO of Gonzalez Insurance Group, OneRepublic singer Ryan Tedder.
Working in favor: A strong state economy and name recognition.
Working against: National voting trend that favors Republicans and personal political missteps.
