I’m stumped.
Everyone else seems to be stumped, too. But it’s my job as a columnist and an analyst of Colorado politics not to be stumped. It’s right there in the columnist job description — along with no (bad) puns and the right to consider deadlines as, well, guidelines.
So, I need your help.
Maybe we should hold a contest — say, a free Colorado Sun T-shirt or cap for the best five explanations for the mysterious self-sabotage of Jared Polis’ political career in his final years as governor. Email me at milittwin@gmail.com and put “Explaining Polis” in the subject line.
Want early access to
Mike’s columns?
Subscribe to get an
exclusive first look at
his columns twice a week.
If I get enough good ones, I’ll write about them. If not, I’ll just content myself with knowing that Polis is a lame duck and will soon be somebody else’s problem.
Or maybe not. Despite the Tina Peters blunder, despite Polis’ continued affinity for RFK Jr., despite the fact that he has been censured by his own state party, despite everything, the New York Times has included Polis in its (very) long list of 2028 presidential contenders.
I laughed when I saw that. I’m still laughing.
Polis couldn’t even win his own state in a Democratic (or Republican) primary, much less win a nomination. He has made sure of that. The only person I could think of who Polis would beat anywhere is Victor Marx, unless, of course, Marx killed him first.
By the way, the Times list also includes Rep. Jason Crow, which makes some sense. Crow has become one of the faces of opposition to Trump’s Iran, uh, policy. In fact, you can probably find Crow somewhere on your big-screen TV now, telling us that Trump had no strategy going into the war and has even less idea how to get out.
Crow is good on TV. He’s very good at grilling Trump officials in committee hearings. But Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff seems to be the new flavor in newbie contenders these days.
And, anyway, if Crow does run for a new job in 2028, it would almost certainly be for senator, if, as expected, Michael Bennet steps aside.
So, back to Polis. You may recall the days when Polis was rolling along as a middling, fairly popular governor who had used his own fortune to help win the Democratic primary way back when and then depended on the failures of the state GOP to ensure that he’d be easily reelected. In those days, there were people who thought he might have a place in the moderate, no-mandates, rich-guy, business-friendly lane of a Democratic primary.
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
And then, out of nowhere, he became the only Democrat of note to welcome — yes, welcome — Donald Trump’s wacky cabinet nomination of anti-vaxxing, dead-bear-dumping, dead-whale-head-chopping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the nation’s health services.
It was — how shall we put it?— nuts for Polis to say he was excited that Kennedy would be the HHS secretary. And even now that we have the highest number of measles cases in 35 years under Kennedy, Polis still hasn’t admitted he was wrong. I get that. Polis likes to be seen as idiosyncratic — and it’s not just the shoes.
But the commutation of election grifter Tina Peters’ sentence, even as her sentencing was still being adjudicated, was far worse. It was so bad he was censured and became a pariah in his own party. It was another example of Polis — who described his decision to spring Peters as a First Amendment case and even invoked the ACLU’s defense of Nazi marchers in Skokie, Illinois, to defend his decision— demonstrating his belief that he’s always the smartest guy in the room.
Months before Polis finally granted clemency — against the unanimous wishes of his clemency board — I wrote that if he went through with it, he was writing his political obituary. Which I feel sure he has.
But I didn’t see him adding this latest chapter — with his assault on socialism, as if socialism was at our doorstep or commies were under our beds.
He has made it into his cause. Should we call him Tailgunner Jared now?
Ever since Melat Kiros, the young democratic socialist, upset 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette to, in effect, win a seat in Congress, Polis has been going out of his way to stand up for capitalism, even, I guess, runaway, trillionaire-making capitalism.
And speaking of Kiros, Shimon Blau, an unaffiliated first-time candidate who said he’s concerned about her statements on Israel and the fatal Boulder bombing of pro-Israeli marchers, qualified on Friday to run against her. It’s the longest of long shots.
It should be noted that Polis made his first post about the dangers of socialism to America while taking on Trump for demanding equity positions in mostly high-tech companies. He wrote: “This is why socialism is dangerous. When government owns part or all of private companies, government is no longer just setting the rules — it becomes a player in the game and sets the rules to its own advantage and against the people.”
That makes sense. But what Trump is doing is not socialism, even the Bernie Sanders style of democratic socialism, at least not directly. It’s bullying and it’s corrupting and it’s another symbol of Trump’s authoritarianism. He takes. That’s what he does. And if he can do it by humiliating people even richer than he is, all the better.
But after getting in a social media spat with a Colorado state legislator, who said his post was a shot at Kiros, Polis has upped the ante. He’s now on an anti-socialism tour, taking his talents to Fox News and even (humiliating as it might be) Newsmax. And although he says that there are only a few socialists among Democratic officeholders and that Trump is the real problem, he knows what he’s doing.
Nobody on Newsmax wants to talk to him about Trump. They want to talk to Polis about Dems embracing socialism. And he’s happy to go along.
In a fascinating story in the Sun’s latest Unaffiliated newsletter about Polis’ journey, Colleen Sullivan writes that Polis may, in fact, be looking for a lane to run in as president. It would be the anti-socialist lane, which may be not quite as crazy as it sounds.
Sullivan writes: “Political watchers note that it might be strategic for candidates to zig while an increasing number of political candidates follow the zagging momentum of New York mayor and recently minted socialist icon Zohran Mamdani.”
One analyst told her that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are also looking at possibly filling the anti-left-wing lane in the 2028 Dem primaries. But if they zig, they don’t have Tina Peters and RFK Jr. on their zagging resumes, as Polis does.
Still, it makes some kind of sense. Polis may have just the right amount of hubris, and self-delusion, to think he could pull it off. I mean, he did say his Peters decision would be fondly remembered. How much more delusional can you be?
That’s the best answer I can come up with.
I hope you can do better. Send me your emails.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.