At a news conference on Friday, the last day for him to sign or veto bills produced by the 2009 regular session, Gov. Bill Ritter said he and the Legislature had achieved their goals.

“Despite a tough economy and a tough budget, we created jobs and we made the economy stronger,” Ritter said. “We expanded health coverage. We improved transportation funding. We reformed education, we expanded opportunities for kids, and we preserved the safety net at a time when people need it most.”

He pronounced the session “a wholesale success.”

Less clear was whether the session was a success for the governor’s political prospects. The bill-signing season that follows the end of the session revealed splits in the Democratic Party that could hurt Ritter’s campaign for re-election in 2010.

Ritter signed 99.1 percent of the 468 bills approved by the Legislature this session. You’d expect such a high ratio since the governor and the majorities in both houses of the Legislature are Democrats.

Of the four bills the governor vetoed, two – easing background-check requirements for gun buyers and adding a representative from a casino area to the state gaming commission – were sponsored by Republicans. Ritter didn’t have to skin his knuckles opposing those.

But the other two vetoes were of Democratic-sponsored bills near and dear to labor unions. Ritter has reason to avoid contradicting his own party’s legislators and antagonizing a core Democratic constituency.

The first bill would have allowed locked-out union workers to receive unemployment compensation. Ritter’s veto riled grocery workers who had been counting on the bill to improve their bargaining position with the state’s supermarket chains. The second bill would have given formal collective bargaining status to firefighter unions. Union leaders angrily denounced that veto as a double-cross.

Ernie Duran, president of the grocery workers’ union, said that in 2006, Ritter completed a candidate questionnaire in which he declared, “If the state legislature approved a bill allowing public employees to collectively bargain their contracts, I would sign it.”

Ritter defended his vetoes again on Friday. “You can’t do this job without sometimes disappointing people whom you care a great deal about,” he said. “That’s just leadership.”

Other Democrats didn’t respond to voice messages seeking comment on their party’s public squabble. But Republicans were delighted to weigh in.

Ritter “did the right thing” in vetoing the two bills, said Rep. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs, but added that “his own party put him in a very difficult, tenuous situation.”

Liston said he approached Rep. Edward Casso, D-Commerce City, the House sponsor of both vetoed labor bills, during consideration of the lockout bill in the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee, where they both serve.

“I said, ‘Are you sure you want to put your governor in this position?'” Liston recalled. Casso, he said, “just kind of shrugged and said, ‘Well, we’ll see what happens.'”

Liston said the lockout bill need never have come to Ritter’s desk.

“With a little cooperation or a little pressure behind the scenes, we could have had the votes with just enough Democrats to kill the bill,” Liston said. “But they somehow fumbled the ball and let it come to a vote.”

Rep. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, cited several examples of 11th-hour signal changes from the governor’s office on the first floor of the Capitol that seemed to catch Democratic leaders by surprise on the second floor, in the Senate and House chambers.

“Consistently, the governor creates expectations within his party, and then disappoints those expectations,” Gardner said, adding that Ritter’s background as a prosecutor didn’t hone his political skills.

“I think he’s a very fine lawyer,” Gardner said. “I don’t think he’s a very good politician.”

Bob Loevy, a political science professor at Colorado College and veteran observer of state politics, disagreed. “Ritter is doing what he needs to do to get re-elected,” Loevy said. “He’s running to be re-elected in the general election and he’s taking his chances that he can get through a Democratic primary.”

Ritter has nurtured an image as a moderate, Loevy said. “For a Democrat, that means being the person who has to take away some of the stronger desires of the far left in the Democratic Party,” he continued. “That’s mainly what he’s used his veto pen to do, is to tame the left wing, and that, of course, includes labor.”

The unions “will probably have difficulty finding a substantial candidate to challenge Ritter” in a primary, Loevy said. As for the general election, he said, “it’s very easy to be against someone when you don’t know who their opponent is going to be.” When the unions are confronted with the Republican alternative, “you may find them rallying around Bill Ritter very quickly,” Loevy said.

But Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, said he thought Ritter was “quite vulnerable,” and added, “I think it gives Republicans this next year a nice opening.”

“We’re happy campers,” said Kay Rendleman, chairwoman of the El Paso County Republican Party. She said a couple of vetoes would not redeem Ritter’s overall record, which she described as higher taxes and fees combined with job-destroying environmental regulations.

“He has to be the weakest chief executive we’ve had in decades,” said Dick Wadhams, chairman of the state GOP.

Ritter said Wadhams was “the puppeteer” behind Republican obstructionism, which he described as “the audacity of nope.”

“The way we answer our critics is by doing the things we say we’re going to do,” the governor said.

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Ben, a border collie, herded a flock a sheep as part of a demonstration at the opening day of the Rock Ledge Ranch Historical Site annual sheep shearing event Saturday. Photo by KIRK SPEER, THE GAZETTE

KIRK SPEER