Eager to do anything and everything they can to push back on Trump, Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper have been coming alive on social media, but they haven’t stopped there. Both have taken the Democrats’ natural talent for generating noise in the news media to new heights, holding what could best be described as political infomercials here in Colorado, with the progressive press just nodding along.
Bennet, as described in a June 4th article in Colorado Public Radio (CPR), held an “in-person roundtable” for energy executives attended by luminaries such as Robert Kennedy (president of Xcel) and Mark Gabriel (CEO of Brighton-based United Power) to discuss how the federal government yanking renewable energy subsidies could make Colorado’s energy prices go higher.
Hickenlooper, not to be outdone, held a Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee hearing on Friday May 30, which the Colorado Sun later profiled in an article. As with Bennet’s roundtable, this one was a panel discussion, but this time featuring the good senator and some outdoor recreation business owners. The complaints this time were how Trump’s tariff policy is hurting the outdoor recreation business in Colorado.
If you remember infomercials, you probably remember they had all the trappings of a normal TV show: a host, a guest, and an audience. If you paid attention, however, you’d catch on that something wasn’t right.
I got that same vibe reading both articles. Something fishy was going on. The guests were too enthusiastic, no one had anything contrary to the central message to say, and the “hosts” (Bennet and Hickenlooper in this case) shilled like no one’s business.
What Hickenlooper and Bennet are doing is, at least by the standards of our rough and tumble two-party system, understandable. When you are in the minority, you spend most of your time talking about the awful things the majority is doing.
Going along to get along
What is unexpected is how credulous the progressive media are about what they’re presented. Perhaps they’re like the gormless fool who thinks the infomercial about the vacuum sealer is actually a news program. Or perhaps they are aware of what’s going on, but happen to like the message so they’re happy to play along.
When you read about Bennet’s roundtable, you get the feeling that this was some organic gathering of people, with a variety of perspectives, who just happen to share the (completely natural) feeling that Republicans preventing the rest of the country from socializing the cost of Colorado’s energy policy choices is wrong.
The Sun’s effort is perhaps a bit more justifiable as news. Rather than the nebulous round table, what Hickenlooper did was indeed a genuine field hearing of one of his Senate committees. Senators sometimes hold hearings in their home states with an invited panel, but it’s unusual for a single senator to be allowed one when he’s from the minority party. It makes one wonder just exactly what Hickenlooper had to trade to get the Republican head of the committee to allow a field hearing, solo, in a Democrat state.
Whatever the horse trading was, the simple fact is that this hearing was a dressed up press conference. There was only Hickenlooper there, with only the witnesses he chose. There was no one else to press the panelists about their comments. All of this should have stood out like a sore thumb to the Sun reporter. All of it was worth at least some mention in his article. Apparently none of it did and there was no mention.
To be sure I hadn’t missed something, I wrote to both reporters to ask some general questions about the events, but didn’t hear back.
Whether a press conference dressed up as a round table or a barely-meets-the-legal-definition Senate hearing, the left-leaning Sun and equally leftward tilting CPR showed a startling lack of the kind of skepticism I daresay would be on full display if the political parties were reversed.
At least with an infomercial you get a notice that it’s a paid advertisement.
Staying mum looks like little more than a favor to the Democrat senators. Hickelooper and Bennet may be shameless politicians, but CPR and the Sun are guilty here of letting them be so without comment.
Cory Gaines teaches college physics and is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. He also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack
