Exclusive Interview: Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper on Governor Campaign

DENVER, Colorado -- Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is a test case, a kind of human guinea pig. The proposition being tested is whether a nice guy -- or, more to the point, a politician who refuses to run negative political ads -- can still be elected in a contested statewide election in a swing state. That is the question Colorado voters are fixing to answer on Tuesday when they choose their next governor.

"I look at the business world sometimes and you don't see General Motors doing attack ads about Toyota -- and there's a reason for it," he tells Politics Daily (interview highlights at right below; full interview here). "They know that when you do a really negative ad on a competing product, not only are you knocking down that product, you are diminishing all the people who use or believe in that product. The same thing is true in politics. Every time you do a negative or attack ad, you're not just attacking that candidate, that person. You're attacking all the people that worked for them, that believed in them, so that after the election, it gets that much harder to bring everybody together."

A geologist by training, the 58-year-old Pennsylvania native moved to Colorado in 1981 to work in the oil fields for Buckhorn Petroleum. The worldwide downturn in oil prices – and the resulting collapse in the 1980s of domestic oil exploration -- left him without a job or serious prospects of employment in his chose field. And so John Hickenlooper began to contemplate a new line of work. He dreamed of being his own boss, actually, of opening a restaurant and bar, where beer was brewed on the premises.

And so, the Wynkoop Brewing Co. opened in 1988, the first brew pub in the Rocky Mountains. Hickenlooper turned out to have a knack for business, or for seeing how things could change, and not just in ways that made him money. Partly because his preferred location for his saloon was in a seedy part of Denver, it took him some 20 visits to local banks to secure the loans he needed. And his own partners were nonplussed at Hickenlooper's decision to advertise the presence of nearby restaurants.

But Hickenlooper had a mental picture that went beyond the walls of Wynkoop. He envisioned a thriving downtown Denver, where competing restaurants actually helped each other by helping to build a prosperous and popular urban neighborhood that would encourage the street life of the city. In his telling, other businesses weren't really the competition -- and neither, ultimately were the suburbs. Television was the problem, he'd tell his friends. "We have to get people off their couches."

His success was so immediate, and so complete, that he spawned many imitators. But listening to his clientele had started Hickenlooper thinking in another direction altogether.

"All my customers, everywhere, were so cynical -- every public official was a bum," he said in the interview with Politics Daily. Hickenlooper, who had never so much run for student council in high school, didn't know enough about politics to know if this prejudice was justified or not. But he did get to thinking that those who prized good government had an obligation to do more than complain.

"However flawed our American system of politics is, I think it's the best in the world -- probably the best in history," he said. "But it only works if people are willing to give back, to give five or 10 or 15 years of their life to public service."

A seed was planted, and in 2002 Hickenlooper ran for mayor of Denver and won by a 2-to-1 margin. His tenure in office has been marked by a penchant for politics that is both pro-business and green-friendly. "I am who I am. I'm very fiscally conservative, I hate waste . . . but at the same time I've been fairly socially liberal."

And so, under his stewardship in Denver there was public money available to keep the tree-lined 16^th Street pedestrian mall spruced up, to address the problem of the city's homeless, and to launch a bicycle exchange program modeled after one in Paris. Hickenlooper also reached out to suburban mayors, telling them that the time of the "Denver-first" mentality was over. He was so appreciated in the greater Metro area than when he announced for governor his approval rating dropped -- if only because many Coloradans who liked him weren't aware he was a Democrat.

The campaign for governor is more than a two-person race, pitting Hickenlooper against discredited Republican nominee Dan Maes, third-party candidate Tom Tancredo, and various minor candidates. Hickenlooper has led all along. Maes proved to be an unsteady candidate, first fudging his résumé and later making impolitic statements, including suggesting that Hickenlooper's bike program was some kind of United Nations conspiracy.

As first the Colorado Republican establishment and later the Tea Party Express abandoned Maes, Tancredo (who spent 45 years in Republican politics but is now running on the Constitution Party ballot) has been surging. Tancredo represented a suburban Denver district in Congress for five terms before running a long-shot presidential campaign in 2008.

His main issue is illegal immigration, and his rhetoric can be strident. True to form, however, Hickenlooper won't demonize Tancredo -- even after the camera is turned off in our interview. The mayor refers to Tancredo as "Tom," calls him "a nice guy," and asserts that his own challenge is convincing concerned Coloradans that the state is not losing jobs because of immigration. "People are worried, understandably," he tells me. "But I would tell them that we are all in this together."