Rick Palacio, Colorado Democratic Party Chair
When tasked with writing a postmortem right after you and your friends got your ass handed to you, one would think brutal honesty would be the best policy; as in, this is where we royally screwed up, we failed here, here, and here, and frankly if we don’t do X, Y, and Zed, we might as well concede next time as well. What makes it even the more puzzling is why national Democrats think tapping Colorado Democrat Chairman Rick Palicio to do such a task is a good idea.
Here’s a guy who would still give himself a passing grade despite the abysmal performance of his party in Colorado in 2014. Hell, it was so bad for Colorado Democrats that Palacio didn’t even wait for his hangover to kick in the next morning before firing a key member of his team. Yet, even now as he talked to KDVR’s Eli Stokols about his new appointment Palacio failed to fess up to how bad his party flopped this year. As Stokols writes:
Democrats have put together a small, independent review panel to assess what went wrong in the 2014 election and how to get back to winning — and Colorado Democratic Chairman Rick Palacio will be among its 10 members.
…Palacio told FOX31 Denver Thursday. “While Colorado Democrats had significant wins and losses, this last election was not good to many Democrats across the country.” [the Peak’s emphasis]
This is like asking Neville Chamberlain to lead the war effort, or asking Alferd Packer to help stretch your hammies (“Alferd, is that drool dripping out of your mouth all over our thighs?” Nom nom nom). The bottom-line is Palacio did not lead Colorado Democrats to any wins they shouldn’t have won, and certainly lost many races they shouldn’t have lost. Likeable candidates such as Joe Neguse with his interesting background story, and Don Quick with his willingness to face corruption even in his own party, never were put in a position to win by Palacio. As for when Palacio says Colorado Ds had “significant wins,” can we get someone to double-check the tape to make sure he meant the plural there, because beyond Hick doing his Hick thing, no one can point to another single race in Colorado that Democrats can honestly say went well for them.
But, maybe the bigger story is just that. That despite how horrendous of a year it was for Colorado Democrats, shockingly, it was even worse for their brethren across the country. If that’s the case, Democrats will need more than a postmortem report, they’ll need Dr. Frankenstein to reanimate their limp electoral corpse.