Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper brushed aside concerns that his “face blindness” will hinder his presidential prospects.
Hickenlooper, 67, who is known for his folksy and next-door-neighbor personality, has openly talked about his disease. The former Colorado governor suffers from a condition medically known as prosopagnosia, which makes it increasingly difficult for him to remember people’s faces. It can take Hickenlooper multiple meetings before someone’s face registers in his memory. He was diagnosed with the condition six years ago after he was elected governor.
In an interview with CNN, the Democratic White House hopeful recounted how he was re-introduced to a woman named Robin Pringle on four separate occasions in 2015. Hickenlooper married Pringle, 40, in January 2016.
“It happened, and it was really awkward,” a laughing Hickenlooper said in the interview. “She was perhaps the most skeptical when I tried to explain this condition.”
Concerns over the condition was a hurdle for some in Hickenlooper’s inner circle prior to his presidential run announcement. Hickenlooper served two terms as mayor of Denver, by far Colorado’s biggest and most important city, prior to being elected governor in 2010, making him a staple in state politics for virtually two decades.
But national politics is a whole different ball game.
Some pointed out that a fundamental aspect of any successful campaign, especially in the early primary states, is the art of “retail politics,” and the inability to connect with recurring supporters, campaign staff and volunteers, and potential donors would automatically put him at a disadvantage. The former governor, however, says that he has worked extensively with his campaign staff to circumvent the problem.
“They don’t want me to remember their face. They want me to remember who they are,” he said.
“We are setting up a system where at the end of every event, I download who I met, who I talked to, with a staff person and that process of going over it once is valuable,” he said in the interview.
After every press event, town hall, and meet-and-greet, the candidate reruns the conversations he had with voters and anyone else he met during the event with a campaign staffer. The staffer diligently takes notes on the conversation, and Hickenlooper studies the conversations prior to the next event in the area.
“So, when I get back in three weeks or if I get back to that town in three months, I will have notes on who I met. So, I won’t recognize someone’s face, but I will have a staff person who will point out the five or six people that I have met and had conversations with,” he said. “And I will take the time to prep myself and to review.”
Hickenlooper has engaged in quirky behaviors in his personal and political life that distinguish him from the rest of his Democratic nomination competitors. In 2016, for example, then-Gov. Hickenlooper glided down a 32-story building in downtown Denver with an orange harness and a hard hat with a camera mounted on top for a charity event raising awareness for the Cancer League of Colorado.
But Hickenlooper is also known for telling stories some might call peculiar or just flat-out weird.
This month, the former Colorado governor held a town hall on CNN where he recounted a time in his life when he took his mom to see a pornographic film in the 1970s. “Deep Throat” was the movie, Hickenlooper recalled, saying that neither he nor his mother knew exactly what the movie was about. But after they realized it, he said his mom refused to leave the theater because she had already spent money on the movie tickets.
“We didn’t know what an X-movie was,” Hickenlooper said in the interview. “We thought it was a little naughty, but we didn’t think it was that bad.”
Hickenlooper’s memoir, The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics, details his sexual experiences with seven women, including his two wives.
The latest Real Clear Politics polling average for the Democratic nomination puts Hickenlooper in a distant 11th place with less than a percent support. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has yet to announce a presidential run, leads the pack with 29.2 percent.
