Looking forward to Darryl Glenn’s next venture after his bid for senate falls short.
With his failed bid for U.S. Senate squarely behind him, Darryl Glenn is launching a new public policy consulting firm. We wish him the very best.
Politics is a nasty business and Glenn ran a modest campaign on a shoestring budget (yes, it’s sad that a more than $2.5 million campaign for federal office gets that classification).
He suffered missteps along the way, but his rise to be the Republican Party’s nominee was fairly inspiring. Glenn swept the field with a stirring speech at the Republican State Assembly, knocking out almost a dozen other candidates who could have appeared on the primary ballot with him. No small feat in a race that takes only 30 percent approval to move on to the primary race.
Glenn then faced four serious competitors in the primary who petitioned onto the ballot, two of whom were independently wealthy and self-funded their races. He beat them all. We endorsed Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet for office. It was an easy call to make, as Bennet is a fairly moderate businessman who has served Colorado well in the Senate.
But we do respect the fact that Glenn also has worked for years as a public servant on the Colorado Springs City Council and currently on the El Paso County Commission.
Parts of Glenn’s campaign strategy were puzzling to us — he refused to talk to Denver Post reporters or the editorial board. He was upset over a story one of The Post’s political reporters at the time wrote about an assault charge that was dropped in 1983.
The only reason The Post wrote about the charge was because Glenn denied being involved and blamed it on someone else who had his same name or perhaps it was his now-deceased brother.
Once The Post’s dogged reporters had fairly conclusive proof it was indeed Glenn who had signed the court appearance papers, we felt voters needed to know about the inconsistencies.
Was it a career-ending discovery? Decidedly not. We wish Glenn had handled it differently, though.
His subsequent excuse — that he grew up in a home that suffered from domestic violence and the assault charges stemmed from an altercation in public with his father — is one that deserves both our sympathy and understanding. Rather than talk about the problems in his childhood home, Glenn took the route of trying to keep it behind him. We are not the judge of what an 18-year-old in that situation does and does not remember nearly 33 years later.
We hope Glenn isn’t sorry he ran for office. We hope the new consulting firm that he is opening with his new wife, Jane Northrup Glenn, is a success as the newlyweds move forward.
“My life will not be defined by a single political campaign,” Glenn said in a press release about the opening of DLG Esquire Consulting. “But what has driven me to run for elected office in the past still drives me today. The knowledge that heroes do walk among us with tremendous strength and power. And I look forward to helping them realize their aspirations to change our world for the better.”
We look forward to watching what Glenn does, too.