For reasons I no longer recall, I attended the Club 20 meetings in Grand Junction six years ago. The club’s election year draw has always been its candidate debates. The undercard, featuring West Slope legislative candidates, proceeded throughout the day, building to the statewide contests in late afternoon. John Hickenlooper was running for re-election against a recycled but unchanged Bob Beauprez. The real attention-grabber was the match-up between U. S. Sen. Mark Udall and his Republican challenger, Cory Gardner.

Gardner, who was surrendering his sure-thing congressional seat in hopes of a green card from voters to enter Washington’s hallowed Club of 100, had swiftly cleared the Republican field as soon as he entered the race. The Gardner vs. Udall clash was the day’s heavyweight bout, pitting two skilled and generally well-liked campaigners on the debate stage. It proved a rout. Gardner was disciplined, stuck with and repeatedly returned to his major talking points, thoroughly thrashing then-Sen. Udall – who came across as ill prepared, uncertain of his priorities and unsure of his answers.

Video snippets from his underwhelming performance resurfaced throughout the fall in TV commercials judiciously edited by the Gardner campaign. These were sufficiently effective that Democrats have since grown skittish about attending the Club 20 debates. This is a classic case of shooting the messenger. The debates are not a Republican trap. That same year Democrat Kerry Donovan of Vail launched her successful state Senate race with an introduction that described herself as equally comfortable wearing “…my cowboy boots or my ski boots.” Fellow Democrat Barbara McLachlan of Durango also booted her Republican incumbent known as “Dr. No” at the Capitol.

This saunter down memory lane is intended to serve as preface to the first live, statewide debate of the 2020 U. S. Senate race pitting John Hickenlooper against Cory Gardner. The normally polished, affable Gardner of 2014 was nowhere to be seen on Channel 7, replaced by a raging attack dog that appeared to have snorted a double dose of dexamethasone. It was a poor fit for the senator and, I suspect, didn’t go down well with voters. The attempt to paint Hick as a raging narcissist, who wants to make Colorado’s Senate seat “…all about himself,” fell painfully flat.

Gardner, who long ago chained his political destiny to that of a genuine, fulminating narcissist, only drew attention to his own embarrassing servility to a man he refused to vote for in 2016. Cory best pray his finger wagging, amped-up vituperations don’t find their way into future ads (they probably will). The senator sounded like a clone of the unhinged, arrogant, nonsensical bully he once claimed to loathe. There is little doubt Gardner finds himself cornered, but he is the architect of his own entrapment. If he had maintained his distance from Trump, he almost certainly would have faced a primary opponent claiming to be a more devoted acolyte at the temple of Trump — but that contest would have proven far easier than the one he now faces.

Hick has grown into his jobs. No longer the quirky Denver mayor feeding parking meters and jumping out of airplanes — he became an effective public steward for Colorado. There is considerable irony that he raised $23 million last quarter for his Senate race yet struggled to rake more than a few million for his ill-fated presidential candidacy. He will join the Democratic gerentocracy, good reason for concern, in Congress. Fortunately, Hick seems unlikely to be cowed by either a President Biden or Chuck Schumer. It’s hard to quarrel with his economic results or his heartfelt concern for Colorado. That commitment came across during the debate. His unphased, nearly bemused confidence that “no one is buying your crap” while Gardner ranted on about his ethical shortcomings displayed a maturity badly needed in D.C.

I have to believe Cory Gardner is following the poll-driven instructions of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee mavens assigned to manage his race. That’s a serious mistake, one that earned Mark Udall the moniker Mark Uterus just four years ago under the tutelage of Democratic campaign consultants. Courtesy and decency have encountered a rough patch in American politics over the past four years, but these remain values admired in Colorado. We can appreciate the fact that Gardner leveraged his personal clout to secure full funding for the Great Outdoors America Act and its Land and Conservation Fund after six years in Washington. Truth be told, that’s not enough to earn him another six years.

Silence has consequences. Those who have enabled this president’s erratic behavior, who offered no complaint about his COVID failures, who remained mute in the face of his personal grifting, who ignore his abuse of the Constitution and tolerate his Twitter attacks on anyone daring to oppose him deserve the ballot box reckoning that awaits them.