Congressional Candidate Stumps in Basalt

Congressional candidate stumps in Basalt

Andrew Travers - Aspen Daily News Staff Writer

Two days after resigning as president of the Colorado state senate, Joan Fitz-Gerald spent last night stumping for Mark Udall’s soon-to-be vacant seat in the U.S. House of Representatives at the Toklat Gallery in Basalt.

The gallery of Native American art was an appropriate setting for an evening in which Fitz-Gerald proudly sported liberal war-paint and wielded a sharp rhetorical tomahawk against the Bush administration.

Standing shoeless atop a wooden table in front of a totem pole and a wood-carved bust of a medicine man, Fitz-Gerald assailed the Washington status quo and highlighted her goals to withdraw troops from Iraq immediately, improve veterans’ health care and develop renewable energy.

The standing audience of 40, which included state Sen. Gail Schwartz, interrupted her with applause throughout her speech.

The district Fitz-Gerald is running in extends from the lower Roaring Fork Valley, through Summit County, Boulder and into the eastern Colorado plains. “It’s a big, diverse district,” she said. “But we’re united in one thing, and that is to bring our troops home from Iraq and bring them home now.”

Pointing out that her father was a World War II veteran who sustained a serious head injury in the Battle of the Bulge, Fitz-Gerald promised to improve military health care.

“There are more amputees from the war in Iraq than there were in the Civil War and we are not doing enough to make them whole,” she said. “The cost of this war will not be over until the last veteran dies. We will be caring for these troops for a long time.”

She also promised to push for more congressional oversight of contractors in the war zone. Naming companies like Halliburton and Blackwater, Fitz-Gerald said “we have to have accountability from these war profiteers.”

Addressing global warming, Fitz-Gerald touted her record on environmental protection and renewable energy.

“I carried three bills to make Colorado the national leader in renewable energy,” she said. “We need to get the rest of the country doing what Colorado has been doing. We need to make America the leader in the battle against climate change.”

A politician of the Nancy Pelosi ilk, Fitz-Gerald is a petite, fast-talking, unabashedly left-leaning Democrat.

“Washington is spinning out of control,” she said. “We have a war the president will not end. We have a health care crisis no one will address. Civil rights are being eroded daily in Washington. We have a climate change problem that the president doesn’t even believe is happening.

“In Washington I am going to vote like a Democrat, sound like a Democrat, and I want people to know I am a Democrat.”

Illustrating her willingness to fight the right wing, she discussed battling national Republican strategists — including Karl Rove — when they attempted to redistrict Colorado’s congressional districts in order to gain more seats for the GOP in 2002. Their effort failed in Colorado, Fitz-Gerald said, because she led Senate Democrats in a three-day public debate that proved it was unconstitutional.

But she also noted that she worked out compromises with Republicans like former Gov. Bill Owens on issues such as protecting public funding for Colorado colleges.

Fitz-Gerald also reminded the crowd that she passed legislation legalizing domestic partnerships for same-sex couples in Colorado.

“It’s important for me to be a part of the civil rights struggle of our generation,” she said, adding that she also passed legislation barring discrimination against transgender Coloradans in the workplace.

Colorado’s first female Senate president, Fitz-Gerald entered the state Senate in 2000.

She is now in a tight primary contest that is expected to be the most expensive in the nation this election season. Her chief rival, 32-year-old Internet entrepreneur Jared Polis, collected almost $370,000 in the June to September fundraising period. Fitz-Gerald raised more than $387,000. The third Democrat on the ballot, Will Shafroth, added roughly $208,000 to his coffers in the same period.

The candidate who wins the August 2008 Democratic primary for the seat in Colorado’s staunchly Democratic 2nd Congressional District is expected to take the November general election.

andrew@aspendailynews.com