bobbyw24
08-15-2010, 12:54 PM
DENVER — Among political candidates, there has always been a familiar type: the white-hot ambitious prosecutor with an Ivy League degree, hoping to turn crime-chasing credentials into a ticket to a prestigious job in Washington.
Lately, there have been plenty of examples of another type: the party-crashing insurgent, whose intemperate words and hard-line ideology cause the political establishment to recoil.
It is rare for both types to come in one package. Meet Ken Buck: New York native, Princeton graduate, former Justice Department lawyer, tea party favorite and, as of Tuesday night, the Republican nominee for Senate in Colorado.
He won his latest job after a bitterly contested primary that saw him go from an obscure and cash-starved underdog to a gaffe-prone mascot for anti-establishment conservatives here and nationally.
Democrats in Colorado — with lots of help from the political powers in Washington — are in a furious race to brand Buck as a Rocky Mountain version of Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Nevada’s Sharron Angle, two other Republican Senate candidates whose prospects have been wounded by perceptions that they are too extreme and too undisciplined.
The 51-year-old Buck, who as a young man once worked for Dick Cheney and sought out Donald Rumsfeld for career advice, is in an equally furious race to avoid the Paul-Angle tattoo. In an interview with POLITICO, Buck previewed his strategy to resist being labeled by incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet as an extremist and took pains to distance himself from both these fellow 2010 Republicans.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41023.html
Lately, there have been plenty of examples of another type: the party-crashing insurgent, whose intemperate words and hard-line ideology cause the political establishment to recoil.
It is rare for both types to come in one package. Meet Ken Buck: New York native, Princeton graduate, former Justice Department lawyer, tea party favorite and, as of Tuesday night, the Republican nominee for Senate in Colorado.
He won his latest job after a bitterly contested primary that saw him go from an obscure and cash-starved underdog to a gaffe-prone mascot for anti-establishment conservatives here and nationally.
Democrats in Colorado — with lots of help from the political powers in Washington — are in a furious race to brand Buck as a Rocky Mountain version of Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Nevada’s Sharron Angle, two other Republican Senate candidates whose prospects have been wounded by perceptions that they are too extreme and too undisciplined.
The 51-year-old Buck, who as a young man once worked for Dick Cheney and sought out Donald Rumsfeld for career advice, is in an equally furious race to avoid the Paul-Angle tattoo. In an interview with POLITICO, Buck previewed his strategy to resist being labeled by incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet as an extremist and took pains to distance himself from both these fellow 2010 Republicans.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41023.html