John Hickenlooper is used to being underestimated

[left-of-center2012]

To hear John Hickenlooper tell it, he’s made a career out of proving everybody wrong. Even his mother. When he, as an unemployed geologist in the late 1980s, decided to open the first brewpub in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, few believed it had a chance. “No one thought it would work. My mother wouldn’t invest,” he said. But by collaborating with other restaurant owners in the “lower Denver” district and joining together to promote it as a destination, the concept took off. Eventually, that one brewpub became a chain of 14 across the Midwest, employing over 1,000 people.

When, angered by an increase in downtown parking-meter rates, he ran for mayor of Denver in 2003, he was the eighth candidate to enter the race and an unknown political neophyte to boot. “The pundits said I had no chance of winning,” he said. But he won with 65 percent of the vote, he said, without running a single negative ad.

Now, Hickenlooper is facing the same skepticism about his run for the Democratic nomination for president. And for good reason: He’s below 1 percent in the polls. He lost five campaign advisers in the wake of disappointing fundraising and faced headlines earlier this month like this one in Politico: “Hickenlooper campaign in shambles.”

“In every case, it was bringing together people that normally didn’t like each other and just putting in the effort to get to the point of hearing each other and creating compromise and then creating progress,” he said. His record of accomplishments forms his major argument for his presidential campaign: “I think we did in the state what other people have just talked about.” But in a field of two-dozen candidates all talking about the same things, he may be challenged to find voters who will give him the time to make his case.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/caucus/2019/07/11/john-hickenlooper-storytelling-both-aids-and-bogs-down-his-campaign-iowa-caucuses/1682595001/

[DavidDvorkin]

1. He was far from unknown when he entered the mayor's race

He was very well known in Denver because of the Wynkoop Brewpub.