Your money’s no good here.
That’s the message Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is sending Mayor Bloomberg about his efforts to use his wealth to influence elections in the Centennial State.
The Colorado governor is a Democrat who supports some gun control. But in a recent interview with USA Today, Hickenlooper urged national gun-control groups to stay out of the state’s latest recall battle.
While Hickenlooper did not mention Bloomberg or his Mayors Against Illegal Guns by name, his target was clear. Just last month, Second Amendment groups in Colorado successfully recalled two state senators who had voted for new gun restrictions in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. The pro-gun forces won, even though Bloomberg’s group poured $350,000 into the election in support of the two senators.
What concerns Hickenlooper is a pending recall for a third senator. If she is ousted, it would flip the Colorado chamber from its current razor-thin 18-17 Democratic majority. As Hickenlooper put it, his state’s citizens “don’t really like outside organizations meddling in their affairs.”
In other words, he worries that a Bloomberg intervention to help this vulnerable Democratic state senator might actually hurt her at the ballot box.
The gun issue aside, what strikes us about Hickenlooper’s rebuke of Bloomberg is the reality it underscores: Big money doesn’t guarantee success in politics.
Now, whether it’s Mike Bloomberg or the conservative Koch brothers, billionaires have as much right as anyone else to support candidates and issues, so long as the contributions are legal and transparent (as Bloomberg’s was). But for all the scare stories about billionaires buying elections, the political reality is that when they go on a political spending spree, it can backfire by becoming an issue itself. And that’s fair, too.
Notwithstanding his rebuke in Colorado, Hizzoner can console himself: There remain plenty of people willing to take his cash. The other day, we learned the Mexican government is now accepting money from Bloomberg Philanthropies that will go for ads promoting a 1-peso (8-cent) tax on every liter of sugary drinks, part of a south-of-the-border anti-obesity push.
We may soon learn whether Mexicans object to Yankee dollars coming into their elections as much as Coloradans do.