Gov. John Hickenlooper said Sunday that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be facing such intense criticism over matters including her use of a private email server if she were a man.

“Some people say, and you’d have to look at it, if she was a man, all this stuff wouldn’t be at the same level,” Hickenlooper said during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation. “There’s an awful lot of criticism – literally millions of dollars of criticism against her every week, over things that really aren’t that, you know, against a man, wouldn’t be brought up like that.”

Hickenlooper, a Democratic superdelegate backing Clinton, was responding to a question from host John Dickerson about a State Department audit released this week that sharply criticized the presidential frontrunner for maintaining a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

“I don’t think there’s another shoe that’s going to drop. I think they’ve parsed this about as much as they can. I mean, she was trying to protect family and friends from unwanted scrutiny – she said she made a mistake, right? Let’s move on,” he said.

Asked by Dickerson whether he was suggesting that the federal report was skewed by sexism, Hickenlooper said he wasn’t but maintained that Clinton’s predecessors hadn’t faced the same kind of scrutiny when they’d done something similar.

“It points out that previous secretaries of state had done roughly the same – had used their own servers, like Colin Powell, and no one had come out officially at the time and said, this is a bad precedent,” Hickenlooper said. “Again, she’s admitted she made a mistake. I don’t understand – it’s not like the end of the world. I understand it’s been made a big deal because people have spent millions of dollars trying to blow it into this incredible flame.”

Dickerson interviewed Clinton’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, earlier in the show, and asked Hickenlooper about a point Sanders had made.

“Bernie Sanders said superdelegates from states he won should vote for him,” Dickerson said. “He won Colorado – are you going to take his advice and vote for Bernie Sanders when it comes convention time?”

“You know, the superdelegate thing started 30 years ago, and the idea was, people have been in office a longer period of time, maybe have a longer perspective on things, they’ll bring some stability. I admire some of the issues Bernie Sanders has raised,” Hickenlooper said, listing the uneven economic recovery and the burden of student loan debt, adding, “But I think that Hillary is more likely – in an incremental, kind of hard, problem-solving approach – is going to get results sooner I think than him, and I think I should support who is really going to do the best job.”

Echoing a point he’s made repeatedly on the campaign trail, Hickenlooper earlier in the interview said that Clinton’s experience is a key factor.

“She’s probably the most prepared person to run for high political office in this country in several decades,” he said.

The Colorado governor pivoted from praising Clinton to an attack on billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

“But compare it to Donald Trump, where he changes what he says every single day, he never says he’s made a mistake. Whose judgment do you want to rely on?”

Hickenlooper said he expects Colorado’s growing Hispanic population to help sway the swing state’s nine electoral votes away from Trump, although he stopped mid-sentence when Dickerson interrupted to say that they were out of time.

“I think it’ll play a huge role, and I think every day that goes by and Don Trump says something more that alienates large segments of the American people, I think he will pay a heavy price her. I mean, we knew he was kind of a blowhard – ” Hickenlooper said as the host cut him off to go to commercial.

The interview was one of a number Hickenlooper has done in the last week to promote the publication of his memoir  “The Opposite of Woe,” co-written with the governor’s former speechwriter Maximillian Potter, and Dickerson started by asking about the book.

“You say your book is a ‘call to action for nerds,’ but it’s also very candid,” he said with a smile. “You’re in politics, don’t you know you’re not supposed to be candid?”

A grinning Hickenlooper replied, “You know, one of the reasons I wrote it was I got into politics because I wanted people to believe in politics, believe in elected officials,” saying he thought it made sense to include “warts and all” because the book would be more authentic and more believable.

Hickenlooper said he hoped readers might shed some cynicism after reading the book, even though, as Dickerson pointed out, it makes the political system “[look] so unappealing.”

“There’s some unappealing aspects to public life,” Hickenlooper said, gaining enthusiasm as he spoke. “But you get to work with the smartest people, you get to take on the most challenging issues, and you begin to – if you work hard enough, you can make an impact, you can begin to find solutions and create results. That’s some of the best part of life is to have work that’s real and to work with wonderful, talented people.”

The former geologist and brewpub pioneer also had some advice – familiar to Coloradans, as it’s been a staple of his stump speeches for years – for the national campaigns as they gear up for what could be the most scorched-earth, negative election season in memory, featuring two nominees with historically high disapproval ratings.

Having made a point of not airing negative ads during his Denver mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns, Hickenlooper said there was a good reason to reject running negative advertising.

“I think you have to push back against it as hard as you can,” he said. “The example I always use in business is companies that are arch rivals, right, they hate each other, right? Coca-Cola and Pepsi – Coke doesn’t do attack ads against Pepsi, because they’d work. Pepsi sales would go down, Pepsi would have no choice but to counterattack Coke, Coke would counterattack Pepsi, you’d depress sales in the entire product category of soft drinks. What we’re doing is we’re depressing the entire product category of democracy, especially young people just tuning out. We do that at our own peril, we let that happen at our own risk.”

– ernest@coloradostatesman.com