money pileWe’ve taken numerous jabs at U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet for raising the bulk of his reelection war chest from out-of-state contributors — 64 percent to be exact, while only 36 percent of his financial support is from Coloradans.

So we found it interesting that his campaign should release a list this week of Bennet’s 100 supporters in the Colorado business community.

Not only is it a sad ploy to convince voters that people here actually like him, but an even more pathetic attempt to portray Bennet as a bipartisan lawmaker willing to cross party lines to work with Republicans.

We are to assume because they are leaders in the business community, they are Republicans? We won’t dispute that Republicans are easily identifiable because they have jobs, but Democrats might take it as a slap in the face.

The list includes quotes from those top supporters, including Chris Muhr of All Metals Welding and Fabrication Company of Grand Junction. Muhr delivers the necessary praise in the press release, but in the Federal Election Commission records, we could only find a $450 donation.

The Denver Business Journal also drops some other names like Kim Jordan, founder of New Belgium Brewery (Boycott!) who appears to have only donated, uhm, nothing we can find.

The same for Mayor Wellington Webb, we can’t find a dime he’s donated, and skipping through the list looking through the donor base with random names, we didn’t have much luck, either.

Maria Garcia Berry, who is also quoted in the press release, donated a whopping $5,600, and so did Marco Abarca who pitched in $2,700.

But these are hardly Bennet’s biggest supporters.

Here’s the list of his top donors, and no surprise, the League of Conservation Voters tops the list of Bennet’s biggest financial supporter with nearly $200,000 in donations.

The Blackstone Group of New York is number two, followed by Akin Gump in D.C. with nearly $95,000, Oaktree Capital Management in L.A. with nearly $87,000, Pershing Square Capital Management in New York with nearly $76,000, and finally at number six we see our favorite Colorado Democratic donors, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck with more than $67,000 in contributions.

After that, it reverts back to the away team with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, on and on. We did note that employees from the University of Colorado managed to kick in $51,000, a drop in the bucket compared to what he’s getting from out-of-state.

Although Denver ranked as the number one location for Bennet’s fundrasing efforts, number two was New York, number three was Washington, D.C., number four was Los Angeles, and Boulder topped out at number five.

It was a nice try Bennet, but Coloradans aren’t going to fall for it.

Instead of a top 100 list of business backers, it looks like the Bennet campaign has released a list of the only supporters with jobs they could find in Colorado.