He’s been a lawyer, a mayoral aide and a turnaround specialist for corporations and public schools, all before his 45th birthday. With his swearing-in scheduled for this afternoon, Michael Bennet officially adds the U.S. Senate to his résumé, saying he hopes to be a part of a generation of leadership that “created more opportunity for our kids and our grandkids than we had ourselves.”

Gov. Bill Ritter appointed Bennet to replace Ken Salazar, who resigned his Senate seat on Tuesday when he was sworn in as interior secretary in the new administration of President Barack Obama.

At 44 the youngest member of the Senate, Bennet is a Denver prodigy, having restructured companies for billionaire Philip Anschutz, served Mayor John Hickenlooper as chief of staff and spent the past 31/2 years as the city’s schools superintendent. He won admirers at each stop, especially the last one, where he seemed to defy educational gravity by significantly improving his students’ performance on standardized tests.

But he is little known outside the capital and has little hands-on experience with public-affairs topics outside Denver. Although he said in an interview last week that he had traveled the state as Hickenlooper’s representative and had “an appreciation and to some degree an understanding of a lot of the issues that face Colorado,” Bennet acknowledged that “none of that substitutes for actually hearing from people and what their concerns are.”

He said his listening campaign had begun with a quick tour of the state he took this month with Ritter, and would resume as soon as he returns from Washington.

There’s urgency to the process. Bennet says he’ll ask the voters to return him to the Senate after his term expires in 2010, and his slim policy portfolio and lack of statewide name recognition put him at a disadvantage. His campaign has to begin yesterday, and the Republicans will hold his feet to the fire.

Previewing a campaign theme, Dick Wadhams, chairman of the state GOP, described Bennet as “someone who seems woefully uninformed about where he stands on the issues.”

“It’s not that he’s been in some kind of an information vacuum,” Wadhams said, adding this for instance: “He still doesn’t know where he stands on eliminating the secret ballot in union elections” – one of the hottest issues in the state’s labor relations debate.

“The voters of Colorado will be watching closely,” Wadhams said. “Once he’s in the Senate, he will have to start casting votes. And so at some point we will know where he stands on the big national issues. But he’s a blank slate. We don’t know and he won’t tell us right now. I find that remarkable.”

Bennet knows what the Southern Delivery System is, and where the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site is, and why they are the two biggest federal issues for Colorado Springs. But he has not taken a position on either.

He said he hopes to inherit Salazar’s role as a mediator on SDS, the proposed Colorado Springs Utilities pipeline that would bring water from Pueblo Reservoir to the Springs, increasing the city’s water supply by a third and ensuring that it will be able to accommodate future growth. Colorado Springs is butting heads on the project with Pueblo, which is concerned about the impact of “return flow” water in the Fountain Creek watershed, which drains all of Colorado Springs and empties into the Arkansas River in downtown Pueblo.

Bennet said he would seek “a way forward that’s a win for everybody, that accounts for the desire in Colorado Springs to have the water and the desire by the people in Pueblo not to have their water supply negatively affected.” But he offered no specific endorsement of options for protecting water quality and controlling flooding in Fountain Creek – options that will add to the cost of the project, affecting the bills of Colorado Springs Utilities ratepayers.

Piñon Canyon is an adjunct Fort Carson property east of Trinidad, used for training large mobile forces. The Pentagon wants to expand the 235,000-acre site by 100,000 acres, saying it needs more elbow room to simulate the 21st-century battlefield.

With a huge economic interest in ensuring that Fort Carson will be all that it can be, Colorado Springs supports the expansion. But local property owners are opposed.

Bennet said he would not take a position on the issue until he had a chance to discuss it with the interested parties and to read a General Accounting Office report, issued Jan. 13, that suggested the Pentagon was moving to end the standoff by increasing the amount it will pay for the land.

Perhaps the biggest unknown about Bennet is what kind of a politician he’ll be. In a post usually occupied by proven vote-getters, he has never run for public office.

He acknowledged that election campaigns tend to separate the candidates who have their act together from those who don’t.

“There’s probably not a substitute for having run,” Bennet said. “On the other hand, I do think the experience of being superintendent of a major school district in this country is pretty good training for the back-and-forth of any statewide campaign.”

With Salazar and the now-retired Wayne Allard, Colorado’s Senate tandem at the end of 2008 had 16 years’ seniority. On the day Bennet spoke to The Gazette, it had 16 days’ seniority – longtime Congressman Mark Udall was elevated to the Senate in the November election.

Lack of seniority has its price – Bennet said the plum committee assignments, including Health, Education and Labor, had already been taken. But he said he didn’t think there was any risk that Colorado would get the short end of the stick while he and Udall get up to speed.

Udall, of course, already knows his way around Washington from his 10 years representing the 2nd Congressional District in the north-central part of the state. His policy positions, which can be summarized as antiwar and pro-environment, are well known.

Energy policy “will continue to be a real focus of my attention in the Senate,” Udall said in a Jan. 12 news conference. “We have to take aggressive steps to become energy-independent.”

But Udall said his top priority in the Senate, and for Obama’s stimulus package, was creating and retaining jobs. He warned against measures that would deepen the federal budget deficit without providing a significant boost to the economy.

“This package has to be about investment and job creation, not wasteful spending,” he said. “We have to find this right balance between spending, tax cuts and the long-term impacts on the federal deficit.”

Bennet also said that his focus in 2009 will be “getting the economy moving again,” but that his longer-term goals are less specific.

“The most important thing is going to be being an effective senator, and then along with that is going to be the demands of running a statewide campaign,” Bennet said. “Those things taken together are going to be all-consuming over the next couple of years.”

Bennet’s bounce-around career, while successful, could be described as restless. It takes audacity to tackle the problems of a troubled urban school district with zero background in education. Is the Senate, which places a premium on protocol, seniority and collaboration, a good fit for an adventurous personality?

“I wouldn’t have taken the job if I wasn’t making a long-term commitment to this effort,” he said.

He acknowledged that a legislative role was new and different for him, but added: “The country is facing unique challenges, and I think that there are some significant parts of my background that I think are going to be of use in representing the people of the state of Colorado.”

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Contact the writer: 476-1654 or dean.toda@gazettedev.gazette.com  

About Michael Bennet

Age: 44Residence: DenverEducation: B.A., Weslayan University, Middletown, Conn, 1987; J.D., Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 1993Experience: Aide to Ohio Gov. Dick Celeste, 1988-90; clerk, U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, 1993-94; aide to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, 1995-97; Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, Connecticut, 1997; managing director, Anschutz Investment Co., 1997-2003; chief of staff to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, 2003-05; superintendent of Denver Public Schools, 2005-09Family: Wife Susan Daggett; three daughters, Caroline, Halina and Anne

Office of Gov. Bill Ritter; The Associated Press

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