Mark Hemingway on National Review Online

Boulder, Colo., is known as one of the most politically liberal communities in America. And yet here’s a man named Steve standing in the parking lot of a strip mall, holding up a bright-orange sign that reads, “I’ll keep my freedom, you keep the change.”

In 45 minutes, U.S. Rep. Jared Polis is scheduled to arrive at a restaurant nearby for a “Congress on Your Corner” event. Already a hundred or so people are waiting to make their voices heard. While Boulder may be liberal, Polis’s district includes nearby Louisville, which is considerably less so. And even in Boulder itself, which Steve calls (perhaps rightly) the “the belly of the beast,” he is hardly alone.

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A sizable percentage of the crowd is clearly against Obama’s health-care plans. Civil but heated arguments are breaking out all over the place — one man holds a sign that reads, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” A woman with copious tattoos and a nose ring, holding up a sign that reads “Public Option = Real Competition,” is arguing with several slightly older men. One of the men finally gasps and says, “If insurance companies can’t exclude people with pre-existing conditions, why would you bother to get health insurance until you are sick?” Awkward silence ensues.

This is the second Polis town hall Steve has been to in two weeks. The previous event was even rowdier, he says. In fact, talk of dropping a public option from the current health-care proposal over the weekend has fired up liberal activists in Boulder. They’ve come out in stronger numbers today. At the last town-hall event, it was “maybe 50-50 — but it’s Boulder,” Steve says with satisfaction.

If support for President Obama’s agenda is eroding even in Boulder, that doesn’t bode well for the rest of Colorado. Obama won the swing state by nine points last November; today, the president has his eighth-lowest statewide approval rating there. Which is astonishing considering that all seven states where Obama has lower approval ratings went solidly for McCain.

Republicans in Colorado are sensing the opportunity for a comeback. “For a long time, Republicans made the mistake of believing Colorado was a Republican state, but the truth is that it’s an independent state with a lot of swing voters,” observes John Ransom, chairman of the Douglas County GOP. (Douglas is a fast-growing, Republican-leaning county just south of Denver.) “My feeling is that Obama’s losing those independent voters who really don’t look at things through an ideological prism,” he adds.

Even in Boulder, you don’t have to look far to find the kind of independent voters Ransom is talking about. Yvonne, who does music therapy, isn’t holding up any kind of sign — she just wants to talk to her congressman. Yvonne moved to Colorado from New Orleans a few years ago, after she lost her home in Hurricane Katrina. She says she’s deeply concerned about the nation’s fiscal situation. “I don’t think now’s the time to take the health-care system and turn it upside down,” she says. Yvonne says she was further disturbed when a Canadian friend of hers waited so long for dental surgery that a bone in her mouth deteriorated. The friend ended up needing a bone transplant from her hip, which could have been avoided.

Not that Yvonne is against health-care reform per se. While she finds a public option troubling, she’s in favor of co-ops in theory: “At least it would be run by the members, and not by the government and not people on the government payroll. It makes a lot more sense to me than trying to go in and take over the system and centrally plan the whole thing.”

This touches upon another aspect of Colorado politics that doesn’t quite mesh with the current administration’s big-government agenda. In Colorado — and the Mountain West more broadly — even Democrats tend to have a sort of pioneer-spirit libertarianism. “Look at how much land is owned by the federal government in Colorado. It’s not our impression that the government is not involved enough,” says Ransom. “The problem is — and I think most Coloradoans would agree — that the government is too involved and they’re involved in the wrong kinds of things.”

Representative Polis kept his appearance quiet — taking ten voters at a time back into the restaurant in lieu of addressing an angry crowd. Fortunately, the owners of The Southern Sun had a sense of humor. The restaurant distributed free french fries to the crowd, alternately pushing them as “socialist fries” or “freedom fries” depending on the prospective snacker’s political bent.

Unfortunately, the city of Boulder has committed to “zero waste” goals, and about a dozen barrels of compost behind the restaurant were visible from the parking lot. And you didn’t need to see them to know they were there. The food may have been free, but the overpowering smell didn’t make it terribly appealing. The same might be said of health care, once the onerous stench of government regulation overtakes it

— Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.