Who is Bob Schaffer?
He is a conservative, an education advocate and a fiscal reformer. But the longtime Fort Collins resident is a family man first
By Rebecca Boyle, (Bio) rboyle@fortcollinsnow.com
1:05 a.m. MT Mar 28, 2008
The president waved out the armored car’s window to a throng of admirers as Bob Schaffer poured his heart out.
The third-term congressman felt slightly miffed, having been invited to ride to Estes Park with President Bush only to have him greet supporters along U.S. 34 instead of listening to Schaffer explain why he wasn’t running for office again.
But Bush was indeed listening, as Schaffer remembers now, almost seven years later.
The morning of Aug. 14, 2001, Bush was raising his national stature after a bitter election and looking ahead to his first four years as president. He stopped by Estes Park to clear brush with some children at the YMCA of the Rockies, and Colorado’s congressional delegation came along.
At one point, the van carrying Schaffer and congressional colleagues stopped and a young man asked Schaffer to get out. The president wanted to ride with him, the young man said.
Schaffer climbed into the armored car, noticing the machine-gun-carrying man in the rear, and sat across from the president.
“He said, ‘Bobby, I heard a bad rumor,’” Schaffer said, affecting a raspy, Bush-like twang. “‘I hear you’re gonna leave the Congress.’”
“Well, I hadn’t really come to that point yet,” Schaffer said. He had planned it, but the decision hadn’t been announced.
Bush said he knew about Schaffer’s term limits pledge.
“He said, ‘Well, you should break it, because the last thing I need is another open seat to worry about,’” Schaffer recalled.
He hesitated, and told Bush it wasn’t that simple.
“And he said, he actually used the words, ‘It’s your patriotic duty.’ Well, that’s about as flattering as it gets,” Schaffer said. “All I could think was, ‘My mom is an immigrant. And here is her son, sitting in the car with the president of the United States.’ All I could think of was that my grandfather would never believe this. Only in America can the grandson of a Ukrainian peasant be sitting in the car with the president of the United States, considering whether to run again for the U.S. House of Representatives, and I’m about to tell him no.”
And say no he did. He explained his promise to his constituents — 70 percent of whom had voted for a (eventually overturned) statewide measure to term-limit Colorado’s congressional delegation — and he talked about his kids.
As Bush waved out the window, Schaffer discussed his responsibility as a parent of five, and how his then-12-year-old son would remember if his dad didn’t keep his word.
“Then he turns to me, and he says, ‘You know what, Bobby? That's a pretty good answer,’” Schaffer recalled.
It is one of many anecdotes Schaffer fondly shares about his six years representing Colorado’s 4th Congressional District.
And like many others, the story, at its heart, is about his family.
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Schaffer, 45, is hoping to beat longtime U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs, for a chance to replace Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Loveland, who is retiring from the Senate. He announced his candidacy last May, saying Republicans needed change.
“I don’t believe, where we stand today, that Republicans have established a firm enough footing to ask for anyone's vote,” he said last May 14. “My message to Republicans is a rather candid one, and some might find it harsh — we cannot continue to do what we’re doing and expect to win.”
The timing seems good for Schaffer, given that the overarching message in 2008 is a clamor for change.
A Fort Collins resident for more than 20 years, Schaffer made a reputation in his three terms in the House as a reformer, focused on education and fiscal responsibility. And of course, as a family man.
The son of lifelong public-school educators, Schaffer grew up outside Cincinnati, Ohio, where he played on the national championship football team and was student body president. He and his wife, Maureen, were high school sweethearts, having both attended Catholic schools.
After graduation, Schaffer and his brother spent a summer in Seward, Alaska, working at a salmon cannery and raking in plenty of money. Later, he wrote speeches and fetched coffee for Republican members of the Ohio Legislature.
He and Maureen got engaged on July 4, 1985, on the top of Pikes Peak, and the following summer, the couple moved to Colorado.
Schaffer owned a small marketing business for a while after the family settled in Fort Collins. Northern Front Range Marketing and Distribution, which served the state’s tourism industry, took up most of his time, but Schaffer stayed involved in politics, working for the GOP Senate communications office.
Back home, his mother thought it was just a brief Colorado adventure and that they’d move home soon enough.
Then Jim Beatty made a decision that would jump-start Schaffer’s political life.
The state senator announced he was leaving office a year before the end of his term, and Schaffer helped the vacancy committee review potential replacements.
One of the members encouraged him to apply, adding that he wouldn’t be chosen but that it would be good experience.
Schaffer went all-in, calling every member of the Little League team he coached and asking them to lobby for him.
“Honestly, I called everybody I knew, which was like 60 people,” he said.
The day of his interview, one member of the selection committee grumbled that he couldn’t get out of his house because his phone kept ringing, and it was the shortstop of the Little League team.
Schaffer brought three posters to his presentation: One with a 25 on it, which was the average age of a Fort Collins resident; one with a stick-figure drawing of a man, wife and two kids, the average Fort Collins family; and one with a salary of an average Fort Collins resident.
Schaffer lived all three of them, he said. He was 25, had two kids and earned that salary.
“I put my things down, and I said, ‘I’m your average guy,’” he said.
At 2 a.m. the following morning, his phone rang. The selection committee chose him.
“(After the swearing-in ceremony) I called my mom and said, ‘Guess what? I just got sworn in as a state senator,’” he said. “And she said, ‘state senator of what?’ She didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Eventually, it dawned on her that her son wasn’t coming home as soon as she expected. That was in 1987.
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Schaffer stayed in the state Legislature through 1996, when he was elected to represent the 4th Congressional District.
At the time, several statewide term limit questions had been on the ballot, and many people in the district supported them. Schaffer and his two opponents for the seat took voluntary pledges to serve only three terms.
Once he was sworn in as a member of Congress, he started to notice the drawbacks, however.
Many other conservative members were elected on a reform platform, and many also took term limit pledges.
“They didn’t get promoted, they were written off by the leadership, and then they were leaving,” he said. “One reformer leaving at a time is the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.”
He is not taking a pledge this time.
Though he knew he was stymied by his term-limit pledge, Schaffer still worked hard on education issues in the House.
Democrats argue he was too conservative and accomplished little in his tenure. They are striving to define him as too conservative as the election season heats up, as both he and Udall seek the political center.
Democratic groups accuse him of being a shape-shifter with a far-right agenda who won’t commit on key issues.
Democrats attack him for doing what they call “the Schaffer shuffle,” noting that he has changed his opinion on issues, most notably his thoughs on John McCain.
Schaffer said he supports McCain—he was slated to appear with the Republican presidential candidate at an event in Denver on Thursday, before Fort Collins Now’s deadline—and said he viewed McCain as a candidate who could help bring change to the Republican Party.
“McCain has been one of the few people who has agreed with me on an aggressive approach to controlling spending,” he said. “The current Congress does not have the discipline to reign in earmarks. You need a president to have that kind of experience.”
But the Colorado Democratic Party pointed to a Rocky Mountain News article that quoted Schaffer “dissing McCain indirectly.”
Schaffer said last year that he could not campaign for someone whom he thought restricted the First Amendment. One person in the Rocky story said that must be John McCain; according to the story, Schaffer did not correct that assumption. The quote may have been in reference to McCain’s ardent support for campaign-finance rule changes, which critics argue have hurt free-speech rights.
Colorado Democratic Party chairwoman Pat Waak said in a statement that Schaffer’s previous statements about McCain, whom she called a “rock-ribbed, conservative Republican,” showed that Schaffer was out of touch, even with conservative Coloradans.
“Bob Schaffer cannot, time and again, say one thing and then frantically dance away from it when the polls tell him he has to. Coloradans will see right through the ‘Schaffer Shuffle,’” she said.
Judging from Schaffer’s voting record from his previous experience in Congress, it’s clear education and conservatism were his top priorities. He was closely aligned with the party line; he was even ranked as one of the top 20 most conservative members of Congress, according to National Journal.
But ask him about himself, and his first answer is about being a dad. He hikes and rock climbs in areas around Fort Collins and snowboards with his wife and five kids. Three of his kids are soon-to-be armed services members, with one twin daughter an Air Force cadet, her sister in Army ROTC and their younger brother in Army ROTC.
“They’ll be deployed when I am elected the next senator,” he said.
Asked if he was worried about that, he paused a moment.
“I’m not worried; I’m proud of them. It’s a pretty solemn decision they made, and I respect them,” he said.
The conflict in Iraq that they might be asked to help fight is on Schaffer’s priority list, but he mostly trains his sights on other issues.
“American leadership in the world on a position of strength and freedom — failure to lead results in warfare. War is not where people want to be,” he said.
Having said that, he said he favors “victory” in Iraq, accomplished by gradually turning the mission to strategic oversight rather than continued tactical support.
“We’re in a war against radical jihadism — Iraq is just one front,” he said. “I think the U.S. needs to aggressively confront these killers wherever they make themselves known. But I don’t believe Americans should fight alone. I don’t believe we should fight very long, and I don’t think we should fight for anything but victory.”
That’s a tall and very specific order from any elected official, as Schaffer knows.
Much of the work of Congress is in the parlance of incrementalism. It takes a long time to turn the ship of state, and Schaffer said he has no pretenses about walking back into the Capitol on the first day and shaking its foundations.
He remembers the maneuvering it sometimes took to get his bills to the floor, and he still has friends he can call upon for collaboration, advice and in some cases - Dennis Kucinich, even - a trip down memory lane.
“The advantage goes to those who don’t know what they’re getting into,” he said of the arduous machinations of Congress.
An anecdote about how he learned to snowboard helps illuminate Schaffer’s political methods.
Several years ago, Schaffer’s kids were all on snowboards and he and Maureen were skiing. After watching them, Schaffer decided it couldn’t be that hard, and rented snowboards for himself and his wife.
Like many novice boarders, he soon realized it's harder than it looks at first, and he spent the morning falling down on a bunny slope.
But then he decided to sit and watch others, to “see if I could figure out the physics of this,” as he put it.
Apparently, it worked.
“Something just clicked; I saw it and I got it. I finished the rest of that run without falling,” he said.
His wife watched from a chair lift as he carved down a slope, maybe wondering what expert snowboarder was wearing her husband’s coat.
“I told her the trick was watching other people who know what they’re doing,” Schaffer said.
In politics, he has behaved in a similar way. He names Hank Brown, Bill Armstrong and Allard among his political heroes.
“You’re smart to learn from other people’s lessons and experiences,” he said.
He certainly learned from his own, in 2004, when he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination to replace retiring Sen. Campbell. Pete Coors won the Republican primary and Salazar went on to win the election.
Schaffer has taken the campaign’s lessons to heart, starting earlier and focusing on his core values: education, the economy and family.
Allard’s former campaign manager, Dick Wadhams, who is also the head of the state Republican Party, is serving as Schaffer’s campaign manager, and Schaffer is in the midst of an ambitious fundraising campaign.
So far, Udall has raised more money and from more people, including a greater percentage of donors from outside Colorado. Udall had raised $3.7 million by the end of last quarter; Schaffer had raised $2.2 million.
Schaffer pointed to his base, which he said is largely comprised of rural people.
“Farmers and ranchers have a harder time writing checks,” he said.
But he said they will remain his focus if he goes back to Washington, along with conservatism and education, primarily.
“Long-term public education is the mist important issue facing the country. The economy is important, foreign threats are important, but the failure of the public school system to educate and train the next generation of leaders represents the greatest threat to maintain the republic,” he said.
And again, he’s thinking about it because of his kids.
“My family’s what I’m most proud of,” he said.
