Back in 2008 during my ultimately unsuccessful run for the United States Congress, I got to know some of the people involved in Democratic Party politics. As a long-shot candidate, it could be risky for some of those folks to be seen as too closely aligned with, well, a likely loser. Sounds rough, but that’s reality.

But there were a couple of elected folks who could not have been nicer and could not have more fully embraced my campaign, regardless of any risk to themselves. The first was then Speaker of the State House Andrew Romanoff, who was great. The other candidate who was happy to help me out was then-Congressman Mark Udall, who was running for a senate seat. Rather than be concerned about my albatross-around-the-neck potential, Mark regularly included me in events he was holding in the Colorado Springs area, and shared information and advice with me that was both fascinating (as a former political science professor) and useful as a candidate. Happily, Mark won his election that year and I will always remember his help and guidance with fondness. He was – and still is – one of the good guys out there.

Then came 2014…

In his first reelection campaign, Mark Udall’s campaign always seemed a tad reactive to his GOP opponent, Cory Gardner. To me and to others, it seemed that the Udall team was being too, well, nice in terms of allowing Gardner to assert that he was just a heck of a nice guy who was a middle-of-the-road politician with an aw-shucks kind of mindset. Despite the Udall folks (and others) warning that this was not entirely accurate, Gardner got himself elected, and proved to be almost entirely a MAGA supporter of Trump after 2016. Colorado voters then rejected Gardner after a single term.

Which, of course, brings me to good old boy Joe O’Dea…

A recent Axios article noted that in 2022, we see a bit of rematch, at least in terms of personality, in the form of the two gents running for the U.S. Senate from the Centennial state. Incumbent Michael Bennet (and, for transparency’s sake, my former boss) is running against a guy who is asserting (when he can be found) that he is truly a middle of the road guy, a true moderate, who apparently just happens to be running as a Republican, even though he plans on voting with the Democrats a lot of the time and will be just a good old boy. In other words, to quote Axios, O’Dea wants to be Cory Gardner 2.0.

But this time, the Democrats appear to be ready.

I’ve written before about how O’Dea managed to find time from being an aw-shucks kind of regular guy talking to regular people to go on a trail ride with rich donors and to head off to meet and bend the knee to Mitch McConnell, hardly traits of a moderate who wants to shake up business as normal. And in the few weeks before the election, he’s at it again. Last Thursday, O’Dea attended a fundraiser that headlined extreme candidates like Mehmet Oz and J.D. Vance. Also there was Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters who, on several occasions, has said that because they have never “won a war,” every general and admiral in the U.S. military should be fired, and replaced with the “most conservative colonels” they can find. This from a guy who never spent a day in uniform, and who is running against an actual American military career officer and hero, Navy Captain and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. Oh, and he also thinks the courts should take a re-look at the Supreme Court case that allowed birth control, although he claims he doesn’t currently want to outlaw contraception, at least not right now, sigh.

So, good old Joe is happy to hang around with, and raise money from, the most radical election-denying, insurrection-supporting, vile candidates to be found.

Oh, and if you have thousands of dollars lying around, O’Dea has another fundraiser, to be hosted by Mitch McConnell, coming up on the 19th, because he is a moderate who will oppose McConnell, right? Far, far right? All this to run a fake-moderate campaign against an actual moderate and the only guy of either party running for senate who is not taking a penny of PAC or national lobbyist money.

I can still hear what my grandma used to say: when you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

O’Dea must really think voters just won’t check on him and his positions. He apparently hopes that if he yells “moderate” to the rooftops and talks about crossing aisles, the voters of Colorado will just take his word for it. But the Democrats are committed to not let another “Cory Gardner” campaign slip past. They point out that though O’Dea has gone on record opposing U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s latest proposal of a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks (weren’t the Republicans supposed to be the party of state’s rights?), he hasn’t made too much noise about the fact that he would accept a national ban at 20 weeks. He wants to, as he says it, bring “balance to women’s rights.” I’m not quite sure how you balance a right – you either have it or you don’t.

I suspect the biggest problem O’Dea has is that he is running against that which he claims to be: a moderate who will work across the aisle. He would be more believable if he didn’t hang around with the very far-right mega-donors who repel most folks. O’Dea seems willing to sup at the trough of the millionaires and billionaires, but wants you to think that he is actually hanging around with regular folks (who presumably have their rights in balance?)

But he doesn’t get to have it both ways.

You don’t get to campaign with J.D. Vance, who (among other things) has claimed that he didn’t care what happened in Ukraine, that the Biden administration is purposely flooding Americans with fentanyl (maybe he wonders if they sneak it into those “vaccine” shots?), and that the only purpose of Indigenous People’s Day is to tick people off.

Dogs? Fleas? O’Dea wants it both ways, but the only way that that can work for him is if nobody checks on what he actually says and does. Happily, there is still a free press to keep an eye on him and whom he chooses for his dinner companions.

Turns out, he is not an average Joe at all.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.