BOULDER– National leaders of the Obama reelection campaign recently told students gathered on the University of Colorado campus here that winning swing-state Colorado is among the highest priorities for the campaign and that youth voters are the linchpin in this year’s victory strategy.
Low turnout among youth voters for the Republican Super Tuesday primary contests suggests the GOP is making a major strategy misstep this year, analysts told the Colorado Independent. They said that Republican campaign messages to young people are mostly absent, weak or a turn-off and they called youth outreach efforts uninspired. They said the party looks to be continuing a disastrous trend sure to be exploited in the general election by President Obama, the man whose candidacy drew out young people as voters and volunteers in record numbers in 2008.
As prominent Tea Partiers desperately urge Republican lawmakers and Republican presidential primary voters to move further to the right, President Obama is racing ahead among independents. Public Policy Polling, delivering results today from its first national poll (pdf), reports that Obama leads GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney by a solid five points and that he leads Romney by a whopping 41-point spread among moderate voters.
President Obama is not a popular politician in Colorado but, according to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, Obama would defeat in a landslide Republican Newt Gingrich, whose star has risen of late but who boasts laughable negative numbers with voters here and is despised by the state’s enormous percentage of independent voters.
DENVER– As anticipated, President Obama this morning detailed his plan to use an executive order to ease the burden of student loan debt that presently presses down on tens of millions of Americans. Speaking in shirt sleeves and drawing on his own struggles with student debt as a young man, husband and father, Obama told the energized crowd in an event center hall on the downtown university Auraria Campus that he was determined for the foreseeable future to act wherever possible to relieve economic distress in the country without going through the gridlocked Congress.
Mother Jones today posted a story by Brad Friedman linking to audio secretly recorded at the Koch brothers conservative confab and so-called “dark-money fundraiser” at the Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch near Beaver Creek in June.
Colorado’s Democratic senators – Mark Udall and Michael Bennet – both voted in favor of a compromise debt-ceiling deal today that President Barack Obama quickly signed into law to avert the debt default in the nation’s history.
Vice President Joe Biden visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, Friday to announce that Boulder-based U.S. e-Chromic won the first “America’s Next Top Energy Innovator” challenge. Biden used the occasion to lay groundwork for the 2012 election, answering critics on the right who paint government as the enemy of free enterprise and who cast the Obama administration as insufficiently enthused over U.S. achievements or exceptionalism. Biden celebrated the long record of U.S. entrepreneurial success and argued that the relationship between government and industry in America has been vital in making the country a juggernaut of capitalist productivity and a model for countries around the world.
Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, who serves on key Senate intelligence and armed forces committees, issued the following statement on Sunday night’s announcement by President Barack Obama that U.S. special forces killed 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden: “Thousands of American men and women have fought and died to defeat the terrorists led by Osama bin Laden who attacked our nation on September 11, 2001. The death of bin Laden is a major milestone in U.S. efforts to eradicate terrorism and keep our homeland safe.”
Two Colorado congressmen whose districts include all or parts of the state’s extensively drilled and mined Western Slope had very different reactions to today’s speech on energy policy by President Barack Obama. Obama, speaking at Georgetown University on the heels of a report he requested from the U.S. Department of Interior detailing unused oil and gas leases, took a shot at the 2008 “drill, baby, drill” Republican campaign rhetoric and chided today’s GOP for trying to blame rising gas prices on his administration.
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