It’s been nearly four months since former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper declared he is running for president, and he’s still right where he started: hardly anyone cares.
For most voters, Hick is difficult to pick out in a crowd of white, mostly male candidates. And when he does shine, it’s often because he possesses an uncanny ability to say exactly the things his audiences do not want to hear. During a CNN town hall meeting three weeks after he announced his candidacy, moderator Dana Bash asked him, if nominated, would he consider choosing a woman as his vice presidential candidate?
“Of course,” he replied, before continuing, “But I’ll ask you another question: How come we’re not asking, more often, the women, ‘Would you be willing to put a man on the ticket?’”
Hick chuckled, but to many watching, the joke didn’t quite land. In early June, he told a crowd gathered at the California Democratic Party’s convention that “socialism is not the answer” if the question is about how to defeat President Trump. That time he got booed: another middle-aged white man resisting his party’s leftward lurch.
But Hick is, in fact, not just another boring white man in a sea of them. He’s more interesting. He just needs to embrace what makes him so.
He lost his father when he was 8. He ditched his dream of becoming a geologist when he got laid off from a Denver-based petroleum company in the mid-1980s. He tried and failed at marriage. He captured two terms as Denver mayor and then as governor of Colorado, running as a pro-business Democrat and on the success of his business, Wynkoop Brewing Company.
Hick opened Wynkoop in 1988, and it was one of the first brewpubs in the United States. Throughout its early years, he devoted himself to cementing it into Denver’s civic life. That meant working out cross-beneficial deals with nearby restaurants, orchestrating colorful promotional stunts, and corralling the city government into favoring small business interests. Wynkoop was Hick’s baby, and as it grew, he grew.
It also began paying him back in ways he could not have envisioned. In 1996, Hick decided to raise money for local charities with a limited-release set of brews featuring labels designed by well-known authors. He enlisted the efforts of a number of local writers, as well as the nationally syndicated columnist Dave Barry. But Hick also wanted a contribution from his favorite author: Kurt Vonnegut.
Now, Vonnegut didn’t typically do promotions. Since the success of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and the subsequent flop that was Breakfast of Champions (1973), the science fiction writer’s life had unwound down a roller coaster of divorce and depression. He had put out a few novels and several short stories in the intervening decades, but without the same wisecracking energy that had marked his work in the late 1960s. Hick called him up anyway.
Vonnegut resisted, at first. But as the two kept talking, they discovered a strange connection. Hickenlooper’s father and Vonnegut had been good friends and hall mates at the Delta Upsilon fraternity house while studying at Cornell in 1940. Father’s best friend and son talked for a long while, and the next day, Vonnegut sent over a fax — he refused to use email — of all his reminiscences of the brewer’s late father.
“He told me things about him I never knew. He really filled in some of the blanks,” Hick later told the Denver Post.
After that conversation, Vonnegut not only agreed to submit a story for his charity project, but he also said he would come out to Denver for a public reading. Vonnegut suggested Hick brew “Kurt’s Mile High Malt” with the writer’s grandfather’s favorite beer recipe and contributed a cartoon self-portrait of his mustachioed face to accompany “Merlin,” his 160-word short story about King Arthur and some Tommy guns, on the beer label. Neither man knew it, but it was the last short story Vonnegut would release in his lifetime, and Hick was the publisher.
After visiting Denver, the two remained friends. Vonnegut loved that he had been able to help Hick find his father, even if only through memory. He recounted his favorite part of the encounter in his final novel, Timequake (1997), alongside a reproduction of his beer label self-portrait.
“I told young John Hickenlooper a joke his dad taught me,” Vonnegut wrote. “It worked like this: His dad would say to me, no matter where we were, ‘Are you a member of the Turtle Club?’ I had no choice but to bellow at the top of my lungs, ‘YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!’”
Vonnegut would pull the same joke on Hick’s father.
“On some particularly solemn and sacred occasion, such as the swearing in of new fraternity brothers,” Vonnegut wrote, “I might whisper to him, ‘Are you a member of the Turtle Club?’ He would have no choice but to bellow at the top of his lungs, ‘YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!’”
The younger Hickenlooper was touched at the inclusion. “It was surreal. It was really beyond anything that I could have ever imagined,” he told New York magazine. “Not because I felt, like, celebrated or accomplished, or anything. But I felt like I somehow was in the presence of greatness and the, kind of, inner world.”
When Hick ran for mayor in 2003, he asked Vonnegut to endorse him.
“John! If I endorsed you, I have to endorse everybody,” Hick recalled Vonnegut saying on the phone, as the old writer became “grumpy” at the prospect of entering Colorado politics.
“Well, Kurt, I just asked, don’t think you have to — absolutely, don’t, don’t, don’t think you have to do it,” Hick told him.
“Oh, well that’s good, just make my life painful,” Vonnegut replied.
The next day, Vonnegut sent Hick a fax with an encouraging note: “I don’t believe in endorsements. I believe in hope. I hope John Hickenlooper is the next mayor of Denver.” The Hickenlooper campaign printed the message on bookmarks and handed them out at local libraries. Hick won the race.
A year later, Vonnegut made a video for local Denver TV, sarcastically mocking Hick for being a “dweeb” mayor as well as jokingly telling him, “I am your father.” It was a bit disjointed, but characteristic of their friendship. Until Vonnegut’s death in 2007, the two kept in touch, exchanging birthday phone calls. Hick sometimes visited Vonnegut at his summer house in Long Island.
So why isn’t Hick running on this story? It has all the makings of a great campaign yarn: A boy loses his father, but after years of working hard and creating a successful business, rediscovers his past through one of the 20th century’s great storytellers. He loves the country that made this possible and decides to give back by serving as president. Sure, it’s a bit schmaltzy, but it beats anything South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg has cooked up.
Hick is already learning that repeating variations of “socialism is not the answer” isn’t going to win him popularity with the most vocal wing of his party. But he knows his pro-business credentials are his best bet to stay in this race. According to his campaign, his rate of donations ticked upward after his anti-socialism comments at the California convention. And now he’s doubling down on the attacks, accusing Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of not being “pragmatic” on climate change and healthcare.
It’s a good start, but Hick needs his own story to sustain this newfound notoriety. Back when he was the mayor of Denver, Hick said that, like the guy in the Dos Equis commercials, he wanted to be “the world’s most interesting man.” Now that he’s running for president, telling his life story would be a good start.
Nic Rowan is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.
