That Was Overdetermined
By John Hickenlooper has a fan!
What’s the case to be made for him?
John Hickenlooper’s boots weren’t made for hiking.
Were they even boots? We couldn’t decide. They occupied some limbo between boots and shoes and were all wrong for the trek that our group of six was taking: seven hours, about 10 miles, over a 12,500-foot-high pass in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
Just a few hours in, he briefly took them off. Dear God. Blisters, blood: Just looking at his feet hurt. But he waved away our concerns, did some crude bandaging, switched into a pair of ordinary sneakers that he happened to have in his backpack and insisted that we press on. He walked more slowly, sure. But he smiled to the end.
That episode, from August 2015, captured Hickenlooper at his best: upbeat, affable and allergic to drama. For November 2020, could that kind of disposition be the ticket?
So much analysis of the Democratic presidential hopefuls characterizes them in ideological terms: left versus center, idealism or pragmatism, the revolutionaries and the incrementalists. So much is about gender, race and age.
But we should also look at these candidates in terms of the fierceness of their rhetoric and the sharpness of their edges. Do we want a livid warrior or a happy one? Someone eager to name and shame enemies, the way Donald Trump does, or someone with a less Manichaean outlook? Someone poised to reciprocate Trump’s nastiness or someone incapable of it?
Hickenlooper ’20: I went on a hiking trip with him and he seems like a nice guy! Where have I seen this type of analysis before? Oh yeah:
Frank Bruni’s fawning treatment of Bush would peak in late November. A former film critic and features writer, Bruni became the Times’ regular Bush reporter in late August 1999, just as the Texan emerged from a week-long flap about prior drug use. Starting with the 1988 campaign, most White House candidates had been asked if they’d used illegal drugs in the past. In August, Bush became the first major candidate who refused to answer the question. Late in the month, several clumsy half-answers by Bush triggered a short but dangerous frenzy.
Say what you will about evaluating candidates based on superficial personalty traits, it has a flawless track record!
Fortunately, the Times also has op-ed columnists from which you’ll learn something.