Colorado Republicans Get Head Start on Easy Job of Critiquing Ritter, Dems

From this morning’s Rocky Mountain News:

As Democrats raced Tuesday to write what were the final chapters of the 2008 legislative session, Republicans passed around a playbook for taking back the House and Senate this fall.

Not exactly big news, but a fun story nonetheless. Take for example the response of the Democratic Speaker of the House, who must still be feeling the stinging blow of not finding enough support for his plan to gut TABOR:

“I think that’s disappointing but not surprising,” said House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, D-Denver. “When you’re in the minority, you can either take pot shots at the party in charge or you can actually work together and solve problems.”

The legislative session is behind us. And maybe, just maybe, the people of Colorado are looking for solutions to problems that don’t involve more raids on their pocketbooks or sops to labor leaders and other special interests.

But then there’s the response from Gov. Bill Ritter:

“What is interesting and a little disappointing is that spending taxpayer dollars on that kind of rhetoric only feeds the cynicism that people already have when it comes to politics and government,” Ritter’s spokesman Evan Dreyer said, responding to the Republicans’ criticism.

Translation: Criticize Ritter, and be guilty of feeding public cynicism in the political process. Clever.

In its “playbook fact check,” the Rocky apparently found two questionable points in the Republican message. And on one of the two points (“Gov. Ritter has disrupted the 100-year peace between business and labor in the state, setting off a ballot war that could have disastrous consequences for our state’s business climate and its economy.”), the Rocky itself needs a fact check (Ritter started the labor-business battle even before his Nov. 2 executive order).

So altogether, not bad. One might even say Bill Ritter and the Democrats running the state legislature have made it easy for Republicans to do the job of criticizing them with an unusually small amount of spin. Meanwhile, the Democrats and the Ritter administration are closer to spinning out of control.