GRAND JUNCTION — Twice a year, western Colorado becomes, for a moment, the focal point of the state’s political class. Club 20, an advocacy organization representing interests on the Western Slope, had its fall meeting in Grand Junction on Saturday, drawing politicians, lobbyists and the civic-minded from across the state. While most of the meeting was dedicated to presentations about the state budget, water regulations and the “Building a Better Colorado” initiative, presented by former Department of Local Affairs chief Reeves Brown, not incidentally a former Club 20 director, the main event was, as ever, the speeches delivered by the congressional contingent — U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

The tonal intensity of the speeches delivered at Club 20, and their focus, is a pretty good gauge of where we are at in an election year. Bennet was clearly ramping up his campaign voice. Let’s face it, Michael Bennet will probably never gain a reputation as a gifted orator, but his speech at Club 20 was, at times, almost … lively — at one point even punctuated by pounding his fist on the podium.

Bennet’s prepared remarks seemed orchestrated to convince the West Slope audience he isn’t a Democrat — or at least not one of “those” Democrats. He spoke at length on his efforts to work with Republicans on any number of issues, complete with a handout depicting some 40 instances where he cooperated with GOP colleagues, in case anyone in the room missed his speech.

He studiously avoided any mention of the Iran nuclear agreement, which he had decided to support just a week earlier, though no one was under any illusion the topic would go unaddressed. Sure enough, the question came, as a two-parter. The first part will remain forever unremembered by anyone in the room, though the good senator devoted an appreciable amount of time to addressing it.

Bennet then took the next several minutes trying to convince himself that he did, in fact, support the deal, which one can only presume came to him wrapped in a hard-sell pitch that only the White House can deliver. His defense of the deal was impassioned. Bennet said, “I do believe there’s a principled argument that says that Iran is the biggest exporter of terrorism in the world, that Iran is anti-Semitic, Iran has threatened the existence of Israel, Iran has threatened our existence, Iran has done nothing to earn the ratification and validation of its nuclear program, and I agree with all of that.” That ringing endorsement for negotiating an agreement with the Ayatollah was followed by relating how, in 2003, Iran had 163 centrifuges and no enriched uranium, but by 2011 had some 19,000 fervently spinning centrifuges and 10 bombs worth of uranium. Honestly, at times it felt as though he shared speechwriters with Bibi Netanyahu.

It got better: the fist-pounding moment came when Bennet told the crowd, “We need to do everything we have to do, including a military option, to prevent Iran from having the bomb.” As though that wasn’t hawkish enough, he continued: “There’s nothing about this deal that leads me to want to trust them. I don’t trust them. I believe they will cheat. When they cheat, I believe we will be in a much stronger position to use military force than had we gone it alone.”

Well, that’s not exactly going to fly with the “give peace a chance” crowd that constitutes the majority of the deal’s supporters, but paving the way for future military action against a freshly nuclearized Iran is as good a line of reasoning as any I’ve heard for it.

To be sure, Bennet laid out a couple arguments for supporting the deal that didn’t make it sound terrifying. He maintained, for instance, that “no deal doesn’t mean a better deal,” and pointed out, not inaccurately, that the European sanctions will be lifted, regardless of whether the United States supports the agreement. He also pointed out, “We did a deal with Stalin in World War II” (though there are a few million Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles, among others, who might have questioned the results of that deal.)

About the only other brow-raising moment was when Bennet lamented, “We invaded Iraq, which took off the map a major counter-balance to Iran.” Now, I’m sure the senator didn’t mean that the Saddam regime was a net benefit for the region, but there it is.

The senator, of course, was not the only headliner. Tipton opened the day with a speech of his own, covering all of his usual points: EPA and BLM overreach — made more stark in light of the EPA’s contamination of the Animus River — along with the need for regulatory reform and his support for the coal industry. Unprompted, and not unexpectedly, he talked about his own opposition to the Iran deal. Tipton even worked in a new line aimed at the federal bureaucracy, which seemed to appeal to the West Slope crowd: “If it’s broke, fix it; if you can’t, stop doing it.” He also drew applause addressing the near shutdown of the ColoWyo mine near Craig, which would have led to a 7.6-percent job loss in the northwest Colorado town. Tipton illustrated the scale with a per-capita comparison to Chicago: “If we applied those numbers to the president’s home town, 63,000 people in Chicago would lose their jobs.”

The conventional wisdom is that a Club 20 meeting is friendlier territory for Republican elected officials than it is for Democrats, but the region has pockets of staunch liberalism, and the organization doesn’t exclude lefties from proceedings. So it was not altogether surprising that Tipton fielded a question from very Democratic Pitkin County Commissioner Rachel Richards, who, following a rather tortured equating of Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of baby parts with ophthalmic surgery, asked Tipton if he would risk shutting down the government if Planned Parenthood wasn’t defunded. Tipton, no rookie he, handled the question adroitly, assuring all present that he never voted to shut down the government (and reminding all that most of the government never really “shuts down” anyway) and offering the somewhat elegant solution of returning Medicaid funding — where Planned Parenthood’s cash comes from — to the states, where they can sort it out for themselves. A “less crunchy” resolution, to use Planned Parenthood’s euphemism.

The balance of the weekend was devoted to the governor’s talented budget director, Henry Sobanet, delivering an overview of the state’s fiscal situation, and Brown hosting a series of focus-group-like discussions to begin coagulating support for future ballot initiatives aimed at tackling the issues of election reform, the procedure for amending the state constitution, and the fiscal gymnastics necessitated by competing laws such as TABOR, Amendment 23 and the Gallagher Amendment. The day concluded with what turned out to be a fascinating review of water regulation, including a look at the governor’s Water Plan and the EPA’s recently promulgated Waters of the United States rule, a presentation which was tragically under-attended.

Kelly Sloan is a Grand Junction-based political and public affairs consultant, journalist and is a Centennial Institute fellow in energy policy.