Posted on 12/10/2006 9:49:43 AM PST by LdSentinal
Days of blood and debt and fire define Bill Owens' years as governor. Nights of grief and worry.
The eager young conservative elected in 1998 is a remade man today. Accomplished. Scarred. More interesting.
After eight years as governor, Owens will leave office next month, having put his imprint on Colorado and its politics. Views of his legacy are as stormy as his times.
Owens first ran for the office in a more innocent era, on a cozy and concise platform, promising to build roads, boost schools and cut taxes.
And then he was governor and confronted almost immediately by the horrors of Columbine. Awful itself, the grisly calamity heralded a near-biblical sweep of troubles that followed.
Wildfire. The terror of Sept. 11, and its economic aftershocks. Bankruptcies. Illegal immigration. War.
"One of the things I have had to do differently from Gov. Romer is, probably by a factor of 10, go to funerals," Owens says. "We had a lot of crises."
Amid it all, Owens left his wife, Frances, their children and suburban home. The 20-month separation, which ended in reconciliation in 2005, also marked the beginning of the most difficult stretch of Owens' public life.
Early in his first term, before the world was changed by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Owens set in place much of what he had promised to accomplish - tax cuts, money for transportation projects, and school reforms.
For much of the past five years, he has been hard-put at damage control. Given a choice between pragmatism and ideological rigidity, at times to the frustration of Republican partisans, he's revealed himself a realist.
"I have tried," says Owens, when asked to summarize his tenure, "to do the right thing."
For some in the Republican Party, there's a sense of lost potential in his story.
"He had very rapid progress very early. Then he lost control of the General Assembly. And there was a refocus on the fiscal problems the state had," says Mike Coffman, who is wrapping up two terms as state treasurer. "His momentum those first two years was so extraordinary. It's sad."
Owens' support for Referendums C and D, the 2005 ballot questions to address the state's fiscal crisis and "fix" the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR), must serve as a cornerstone in any accounting of his legacy.
The repair work on TABOR cost the governor politically, particularly among his conservative base. If he had national ambitions - and he insists now he does not, never did - they withered.
"Owens receives a grade of a D for what can only be described as a pathetic second term," says the libertarian Cato Institute's fiscal scorekeeper, Stephen Slivinski.
The governor "was once on every conservative's short list of possible candidates for higher office," says Slivinski. "Now he will probably be long remembered by those same conservatives as a turncoat."
Owens won't say precisely what he plans to do when he leaves office in January, but he expects to travel and perhaps work internationally.
"I don't think you will see me be in a full-time position, in one enterprise," he said. "I think you will see three or four things, some of which you will never know about. (I'll) do some things financially that are certainly liberating. Take more time off."
And while he says he hopes Republican Sen. Wayne Allard runs for re-election, should Allard bow out and Owens run in 2008, the lingering right-wing enmity could harm his hopes.
"We have high taxes and big spending in Washington now. Why would we need his help?" says Grover Norquist, a conservative kingmaker who heads the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform.
"Met the test of his time"
Others may agree with the governor's more nuanced self-critique, spelled out in a series of long interviews with The Denver Post this fall: that he failed to do more to improve the state's colleges and universities; let down his party, which lost the legislature, a U.S. Senate seat and two congressional districts during his time as its leader; and got beat when trying to bring water from the Western Slope to the thirsting cities and suburbs of the Front Range.
Yet Owens has risen in some folks' estimation. He tried, at least, to make progress on the tortuous issue of water. He helped secure the state for his party's presidential candidate in 2000 and 2004. And he is leaving office with better than a 60 percent approval rating in the polls, he says.
"You have to give the governor credit for attacking big issues. He didn't occupy his time on little stuff," says former Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong. "He was never passive. Never content to sit back and let things go."
"When you evaluate somebody, you must ask if they met the big test of their time," says former Democratic Gov. Dick Lamm. "And he really did step up to the plate on C and D, and at great political risk.
"The average person has no idea how anti-tax the Republican Party has become. Bill Owens knew he was going to buy himself a whole bushelbasket of opposition," says Lamm. And "he is an ambitious guy - my God, he was talking about the presidency!"
In his resolute response to Colorado's budget crisis, Owens "was being governor of all the people," Lamm says, and "definitely met the test of his time."
The tests of time seemed different in 1998. In assessing how he leaves, it's useful to remember how Owens arrived, as a promising, boyish 48-year-old conservative with a noted resemblance to Sheriff Woody, the hero of "Toy Story."
A former lobbyist, legislator and state treasurer, Owens ran for governor at a peak moment of Republican popularity in the West, a region characterized by political, as well as business, boom- and-bust cycles.
In the 1970s, Rocky Mountain statehouses were a solid Democratic blue. Ronald Reagan's revolution, and a tide of migration from California, changed that. The pendulum swung right, and Republicans made huge gains in Western capitals.
When Owens won in 1998 (by a little more than 8,000 votes over Democratic Lt. Gov. Gail Schoettler), he seized the last governor's office in the region to elude Republican grasp. He was Colorado's first GOP governor in 24 years; his party controlled both U.S. Senate seats and both houses of the state legislature.
The Democrats issued warnings about the dangers of single-party government in that election. Owens, a Catholic opposed to abortion who displays a photograph of Archbishop Charles Chaput in his office, was portrayed as a zealot who would boost the clout of religious conservatives in the Republican ranks.
He recalls: "That is what much of that campaign was about: 'We can't trust these guys to have it all."'
Indeed, the Republicans all sang from the same sheet of music in the legislative sessions that followed. "Let the reform begin," Owens said on election night, and the legislature cut $500 million in taxes - the first of several whopping tax cuts - and passed a highway bond issue that spring.
T-REX: most visible legacy
The following November, the voters approved $1.7 billion in funding for 28 major highway projects and endorsed a mass-transit proposal that Owens backed. The result was T-REX, the highway expansion and light-rail project to relieve congestion in the Interstate 25 corridor; it was the largest state transportation project ever and the "signature" achievement of his tenure.
"That project would not have been built had Bill Owens not been elected governor," says his former campaign manager, Dick Wadhams. "It is probably the most visible single accomplishment of his administration."
To be sure, other transportation projects took a back seat to T-REX. But "the congestion on I-25 was starting to cripple our ability as a metropolitan area to get from Point A to Point B," Owens recalls. "T-REX links the largest employment center in the state, which happens to be the Tech Center, with the second-largest, which is downtown....It really is a jewel."
Taxes. Roads. Schools. Owens had borrowed the strategy of proposing, and fulfilling, a concise list of promises from then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. Next up was education, a specialty of Owens when he served in the legislature, where he had promoted school choice and charter schools.
The Colorado Student Assessment Program, to measure how students were meeting academic goals, was created in 1997, during the administration of his predecessor, Roy Romer. "I took what Roy started and added to it," Owens recalls. He pushed to expand CSAP, and proposed and signed legislation to create standardized "accountability reports" that would permit parents to gauge how their children's schools were doing.
"He brought about some interesting and inventive reforms," says Michael Barone, the author of the Almanac of American Politics. "The most important is what he has done on education accountability, giving the schools and classrooms report cards."
Owens cut off state funding for Planned Parenthood's health clinics until the organization isolated its abortion practice, and he vetoed legislation to fund Internet access in public libraries because it didn't demand filters against violence and pornography. He fostered an image of pettiness by feuding with Lt. Gov. Joe Rogers over state cars and other perks.
But for the most part, his early record was more centrist and pragmatic than his critics had expected. And on April 20, 1999, as the initial reports from Columbine High School were arriving at the statehouse, the first phone calls Owens made were to Democrats.
"I was walking past the state trooper's desk right over here," he says. "My chief of staff stopped me and said there had been a shooting at Columbine. I remember thinking and hoping it was just a wounding. And then within two or three minutes, they reported, well, we think there are a lot. And I am thinking that I hope it is erroneous."
There were 13 dead and 24 wounded before the two gun-wielding students killed themselves too. Owens' first call was to Romer. Then he called Lamm, who told him, "Remember, you are the father of Colorado now."
"I don't feel like the father," he told Lamm. "I am still learning my way around."
The moment "still gives me the chills," Owens says. "I had just been governor 100 days."
Owens went out to Jefferson County and stood with the parents in the middle school gym as they waited for each bus to bring survivors over from the high school. And then, there were no more buses carrying survivors, but there were still parents in the gym.
The funerals went on for 10 days; 70,000 people attended the memorial service. Thousands picketed the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association, which was being held in Denver that year. Owens led the public mourning at a series of events with Romer, Vice President Al Gore and President Clinton.
The governor's natural political sympathies are with the NRA, and he later signed a bill allowing Coloradans to carry concealed firearms. But after Columbine, Owens endorsed a ballot initiative requiring background checks for those buying firearms at gun shows, which passed.
"My job was to bring Colorado back together," Owens says. "In the next few weeks, I was always thinking, 'What can bring us together?"'
His sturdy performance marked Owens as a leader of some depth.
The education reforms, built on choice and standards, delighted conservatives, as did several rounds of TABOR-fueled tax cuts.
Cato put Owens atop its annual report card on the nation's governors. The Heritage Foundation hailed Colorado's school testing policy. In 2002, the conservative magazine National Review anointed Owens as presidential timber and put him on its cover with the caption "America's Best Governor."
He cruised to re-election that fall, swamping Democrat Rollie Heath by 400,000 votes. A year later, in a rooftop garden overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, with views of the White House and Capitol, Owens was the star at a cocktail party celebrating the founding of his personal think tank.
There was no doubt that Owens was positioning himself for a possible presidential campaign in 2008, says Norquist. The governor's record made him a favorite with the tax-cutting crowd, and his family values appealed to social conservatives.
"He was one of the five people who was going to get the Republican nomination," Norquist recalls.
Priorities changed in one day
In the summer of 2001, President Bush visited Colorado on a political fundraising trip. Owens, a native Texan, has long-standing ties to the Bush family and helped deliver Colorado to the president in 2000.
The two of them talked about energy conservation, Owens recalls, and Bush professed shock at how much power is drained by home appliances, even after they are switched off.
Minor concerns. "And then Sept. 11, and all of that was different," Owens says.
Colorado's high-tech sector had taken a hit in the dot-com crash of 2000. Now the state's economy suffered, disproportionately, in the resonations of Sept. 11. Skiers stayed home. Tourists stopped getting on airplanes. Airlines went broke.
Nature piled on.
"All of Colorado is burning," Owens said as wildfires swept the drought- stricken West in the summer of 2002.
And in August 2003, the governor's office announced in a terse, opaque statement that Bill Owens would be leaving his Centennial home and moving into the empty halls of the governor's mansion. His marriage was threatened, and to this day he won't say by what.
Was it his fault? "It is fair to ask," he says.
Had he sinned? "No, won't answer that," he replies.
In November of that year, the voters torpedoed Referendum A, the Owens- backed $2 billion water project measure. It lost in every county in the state.
In political circles, the question arose: Had Owens lost his touch?
"His water initiative misfired more for political reasons than for policy reasons," says Armstrong. "It was a better proposal than it got credit for."
The next year's election led to another miscue. Owens shoved aside the conservatives' favorite candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat - former U.S. Rep. Bob Schaffer - to promote the wealthy beer baron, Pete Coors, against Democrat Ken Salazar. Coors lost. Schaffer is still seething.
"He has been a good father," Schaffer says, when asked for his opinion of Owens' legacy. "I'm not sure somebody who has been a good father would want me to say anything more."
An opportunity for political recovery flowed from an unexpected source. As a young conservative in the go-go years of the 1990s, Owens had been a prominent supporter of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, not fully appreciating, he says now, its effects in hard times.
TABOR was designed to limit state taxes. When tax receipts soared in boom times, spending was restrained and money refunded. When tax revenues decreased in a recession, so did government spending. What few recognized, Owens says, is how TABOR tied future expenditures to those recessionary levels, handcuffing the state government's ability to follow Colorado's economy out of a hole.
"The glitch in TABOR was that while it was correctly designed to slow your rate of growth during the upside, it didn't allow you to ever recover from the downside," says Owens.
"Between 2001 and 2003, state revenues dropped 17 percent," he says. "They forced me to balance a budget with hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts as I was running for re-election."
Much of the state budget comprises mandated spending on education, health care and other priorities, restricting a governor's options. Employing the line-item veto, Owens and his staff painstakingly "put together the budget with baling wire and bubble gum" and opened negotiations with Democratic lawmakers on how to "fix" TABOR.
The resultant compromise, which curbed tax refunds and hiked government spending, was seen as a betrayal by the anti-tax forces at Cato, Americans for Tax Reform and other conservative groups.
Former House Republican Leader Dick Armey called Owens a "backslider." Norquist said the governor doomed his national ambitions.
"The undermining of TABOR has haunted us," says Norquist, of the anti-tax movement. "This was very damaging to the cause of conservativism and very damaging to the Republican Party in Colorado."
Ultimately, Owens and the Democrats settled on state ballot issues that would waive TABOR's spending restrictions for five years, and delete the "ratchet" provision that tied expenditures to recessionary levels.
"He had the guts to stick his neck out and campaign for it," says Wadhams. "Whether you agree with the initiatives or not, he was a critical force for its passage."
After a bruising campaign, question C was passed by the voters in November 2005. To Owens' mind, he saved TABOR.
"By fixing the ratchet, you are not going to see TABOR subjected to the possibility of repeal," Owens says. "We have taken TABOR off the table as a controversial issue probably for decades."
"He is the only one in this hemisphere who believes that," says Norquist. "He is delusional."
The governor has "tried to have his cake and eat it too," says Iris Lav, a TABOR expert at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "He is someone who led his state into a very bad place, then did the right thing in respect to C and D, but was never willing to say the problem was TABOR, the policy."
Colorado's elected officials are more forgiving. Indeed, when rating Owens' performance, there is a clear distinction between those who work for think tanks or ideological interest groups, and the practical politicians who make things work.
In the TABOR fight, and in this year's special session on the problem of illegal immigration, Owens "demonstrated real political courage," says Democratic House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. In each case, says Romanoff, Owens resisted the temptation to exploit an emotional issue and put the good of the state "ahead of politics."
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, another Democrat, agrees.
"People respect elected officials who don't always have a finger in the wind," the mayor says. In backing C and D, "there were an awful lot of people the governor stood up for."
"His willingness to take on the more conservative elements of his party is a pretty significant legacy," says Hickenlooper. "In the end, he clearly demonstrated he was wanting to do the right thing."
A political life
Since childhood, Bill Owens has been involved in politics. As he prepares to leave public life at least in the short term here s a look back.
1950: Born William Forrester Owens on Oct. 22, 1950, in Fort Worth, Texas. His was a Catholic and Democratic-voting household.
1963-64: At age 13, while in middle school, becomes president of the Young Republicans. Later, introduces then-
California Gov. Ronald Reagan to area Young Republicans.
1967: Serves as a page to Texas Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Wright even though Owens had switched to the Republican Party. While in Washington, Owens meets then-Rep. George H.W. Bush. He later leads Young Republicans for Bush in Texas, where he meets and forges a political friendship with Bush's son George W. Bush.
1973: Graduates from Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he had been student body president.
1974: Works as a staff assistant to U.S. Sen. John Tower, R-Texas.
1975: Earns a master's degree in public affairs at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.
Marries Frances Westbrook, whom he met at a Young Republicans gathering. They eventually have three children: Monica (1983), Mark (1986) and Brett (1991).
1976: Works as management consultant in Washington, D.C., for Touche Ross & Co.
1977: Moves to Colorado to work for the Gates Corp. for two years as a project manager.
1980: Chairs the Arapahoe County
Reagan/Bush presidential campaign.
1981: Works for the Rocky Mountain Oil and Gas Association (later Colorado Petroleum Association), as a lobbyist and later as director.
Also becomes the chairman of the Aurora Planning and Zoning Commission.
1982-88: Elected and serves as a Colorado state representative from District 49, south Aurora and Arapahoe County.
Also continues to work for the oil and gas association for the next 12 years.
1988-94: Elected and serves as a Colorado state senator from Aurora.
1992: Owens supports the limits of the proposed Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, or TABOR, an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that voters approve, squeezing state spending tightly.
1994: Elected state treasurer.
November 1998: Owens narrowly defeats Gail Schoettler to become Colorado's 40th governor - and first Republican in the office in 24 years. He reaffirms his agenda of tax cuts, school reforms and highway work.
November 1999: Referendum A, Owens' highway construction bond plan, gets a huge victory at the polls, boosting the Republican governor's popular image and political clout. It allows Owens to borrow as much as $1.7 billion from the bond market to accelerate transportation projects to completion within 10 years.
December 1999: Termed "bold and innovative," Owens' $160 million plan for reforming Colorado education is revealed: Close the worst schools, stop granting tenure to new teachers and require every high school junior to take the ACT college entrance exam.
January 2003: Making his second inaugural speech, Owens pledges to build the economy, strengthen families and protect Colorado from foreign terrorists and common criminals.
September 2003: Frances and Bill Owens announce a marital separation.
November-December 2004: Democrats win control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time in 40 years, prompting Owens to offer a compromise as a way out of the state revenue crunch. Borrowing an idea first proffered by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, Owens suggests a temporary break from the taxpayer refunds required by TABOR rather than an indefinite break. Owens suggests letting the state keep $500 million, about two years' worth of refunds. The final deal calls for a five-year timeout from
TABOR refunds, allowing the state to keep what was estimated at the time as about $3.1 billion.
May 7, 2005: Owens and his wife reunite.
November 2005: Owens and Democrats work together to pass Referendum C, which allows the state to keep billions in extra revenue over five years.
July 2006: Democratic lawmakers and Owens reach agreement on what is called the toughest immigration reform package in the country. The compromise, which ended a contentious five- day special session, will force 1 million people to prove their residency before collecting taxpayer-funded benefits. Some voters are disappointed with the compromise.
Jan. 9, 2007: Will leave office.
Bush Sr. gave us Clinton.
Nixon Jr. brought us the end of the '94 Republican revolution in '06.
Now, in Colorado, we've got a Democrat controlled legislature for the first time in forty years and Owens passes the baton to a socialist governor elect.
He failed to provide leadership to the state Republican Party:Failed to provide leadership to rebuild after the U.S. Senatorial primary.Failed to provide leadership to retain the Republician control of the the State house and State Senate
Led the charge to give away Taxpayers money to professional spenders
This was hardly worth the bandwith.
Thousands of people cancelled their ski vacations believing the 'whole' state was on fire.
The man seems to have turned into a metrosexual before the citizen's eyes.
Bump that !
Thankfully, Hickenlooper's dream of being governor is gone....for now.
He seems to be the closest to a conservative of any of the Democrats
He also thought it would be a good idea if Coors Field was used for the homeless during the winter.
Not exactly conservative in my opinion.
He is a "useful idiot" not an activist anarchist/marxist
Heck, no. Check out the Chinook Fund, which he co-founded.
Whatever Ritter's faults, he's not comfy around those folks.
*ping*
What a shame. He had the world in his hands and lost it all, not just for himself, but for the CO Republican Party.
I see that as active anarchism !
'Governor Gun Control'. Reason the Tyranny Response Team was formed.
Unless he is the only candidate who can win, Bill Owens should not seek to succeed Wayne Allard in the Senate.
I'll tell you when I started to smell something wrong with this guy, not mentioned in the article. Before Owens was elected Governor, there was a, sadly, now little-remembered Republican success story in Colorado, and her name was Vikki Buckley. In 1994, and with little help from the party, she pulled off a win to become the first elected Black female Republican statewide officeholder in U.S. history, when she won the position of Secretary of State (excluding the Whitman-appointed Lonna Hooks in NJ). Buckley was a Conservative, and despite the good job she did, she was ignored by the party, and they decided to focus on Owens instead (with Buckley being a far more compelling success story), and almost trampled her when she ran for reelection in '98 (and she had publicly voiced her chagrin with their non-support of her).
Sadly, the strain and stress of the campaign exacerbated the relatively young Ms. Buckley's health problems and she unexpectedly died not long after Owens took office. Worse, yet, Owens helped to sandbag another promising Black Republican, that of Lieutenant-Governor Joe Rogers. I rather deeply regret that Secretary Buckley was not elected Governor back in '98, I sincerely doubt she would've left the party in the kind of shambles that Owens did.
I am somewhat familiar with those stories. Buckley had health problems for some time, if I remember. And Joe Rogers got caught in some kind scandal, though I don't remember the cause of it. He wound up losing a GOP primary for Congress and never returned to public life.
I am hopeful that Jane Norton runs to succeed Allard (who plans to retire, but won't announce until 2007). Norton could be a conservative equivelent to Amy Kobluchar, a party loyalist with no legislative record that leaves her open to attack.
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