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Decades, of course, are arbitrary classifications, but they can help make sense of what would otherwise be an endless churn of chatter and conflict.

As the second decade of the new century draws to a close and Coloradans brace themselves for the advent of the Roaring Twenties, its instructive to consider the personalities who have shaped the states politics in the last stretch.

No politicians have better embodied the tensions and triumphs of their parties over the past 10 years than Democrat John Hickenlooper and Republican Ken Buck.

Both moved to Colorado from the Northeast, perhaps fitting in a fast-growing state where more than half of all residents were born outside its borders.

Hickenlooper grew up in Philadelphia and earned degrees from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, soon landing in Colorado to work as a petroleum geologist during one of the states regular boom-and-bust periods.

Buck hails from Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, and earned a degree from Princeton University before heading west to get a law degree at the University of Wyoming.

In 1986, Hickenlooper was laid off from his job at Buckhorn Petroleum and began considering what to do next, eventually starting a brewpub in Denvers Lower Downtown neighborhood.

That same year, Buck went to work for then-U.S. Rep. Dick Cheney on the Iran-Contra investigation and later took a job in Washington, D.C., with the Justice Department before settling in Colorado to work as a federal prosecutor.

At the dawn of the 2010s, both men were long-serving local officials mounting their first statewide campaigns.

Hickenlooper, serving his second term as mayor of Denver, jumped in the race for governor in 2010 after the incumbent, Democrat Bill Ritter, set the political world on its ear with a relatively late announcement the former Denver district attorney wouldnt seek a second term.

Buck, the district attorney for Weld County, had been criss-crossing the state for months in a long-shot bid for the 2010 GOP U.S. Senate nomination to challenge Democrat Michael Bennet, who had been appointed to the seat a year earlier.

They both burst on the statewide scene in an unpredictable midterm election year dominated by a national backlash to the Obama administrations aggressive moves to address a financial crisis whose effects were still palpable.

It was a roller-coaster year that saw sure-things go down in flames once Republican voters had a chance to weigh in former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis lost the GOPs gubernatorial nod to newcomer Dan Maes, and Buck wrested the Senate nomination from former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton.

Maes most clearly manifested the spirit of the Tea Party, which emerged to rail against government bailouts in the wake of the Great Recession but swiftly turned on GOP elites, leaving establishment picks like Norton in its wake.

Hickenlooper, who famously launched by taking a shower with his clothes on in an ad decrying negative campaigns, lucked out as the Republican Party tore itself to pieces over Maes, and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo joined the field in late summer as a third-party candidate.

Although Hickenlooper and Buck carried their respective partys banners that November, their fortunes diverged on election night, with Hickenlooper winning the three-way race by a wide margin and Buck losing to Bennet by a hair.

Fast-forward to the end of the decade, and both remain among the enduring voices of their parties, though not without plenty of vocal challengers.

Hickenlooper won another term as governor in 2014 and reportedly made the short list for Hillary Clintons running mate in 2016. After running for the White House for a while this year, Hickenlooper gave in to pressure from national Democrats and declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

Hickenloopers evolving position on fossil fuels over the decade from a cozy relationship with oil and gas interests to declaring climate change the defining challenge of our time mirrors the Democratic Partys, though some of his fellow party members complain the geologist didnt get on board fast enough and hasnt gone far enough.

In 2014, Buck won the first of three terms representing the heavily Republican 4th Congressional District in Congress, where he's belonged to the conservative House Freedom Caucus and has been among President Donald Trumps most vocal defenders.

Earlier this year, Buck was elected chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, fending off a challenge from a state lawmaker whose grassroots supporters charged that Buck had grown too cozy with the establishment.

Like Hickenlooper, Buck is said to have his eye on the U.S. Senate and could be positioning himself to challenge Bennet in the 2022 election.

Other politicians have gotten more votes from Coloradans than Hickenlooper and Buck.

Cynthia Coffman was the first Republican to receive more than 1 million votes, when she won her only term as attorney general in 2014. Her total, however, has since been surpassed. The GOP candidate who has gotten the most votes in Colorado is Darryl Glenn, the 2016 U.S. Senate nominee, followed by Donald Trump in 2016, and attorney general nominee George Brauchler in 2018.

Coffman, notably, was the only one of the top vote-getting Republicans who won their race in Colorado.

On the Democratic side of the ledger, Bennet holds the record for the most votes received in the state, in his 2016 win over Glenn, followed by Jared Polis total in his 2018 win for governor and Hillary Clintons 2016 win over Trump.

Among the hundreds of Democrats and Republicans who vied for the titles this decade, two runners-up stand out.

Republican Cory Gardner broke a decade-long losing streak by Republicans at the top of the ticket in Colorado in 2014 when the two-term congressman won election to the U.S. Senate. And he accomplished that by unseating Democrat Mark Udall, marking the first time since 1978 that Colorado senator was denied re-election.

Hickenlooper is hoping to deny Gardner a second term in next year election, but theres no denying a contention made by veteran Republican strategist Dick Wadhams that if Gardner hadnt won in 2014, the Colorado GOP could have been ushered into the wilderness for the rest of the decade.

Battles over taxes, energy and education have consumed plenty of oxygen this decade, but nothing influenced the political climate like the raging debate over health care, and no one incarnates that among Democrats more than Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera.

The Broomfield Democrat began the decade by losing her bid for a third term in the state House to a Tea Party Republican but regained her seat in the next election and won another term after that.

A four-time cancer survivor, Primavera served as CEO of Komen Colorado before Polis picked her as his running mate. Soon after they were sworn in, he named her to head the governors Office of Saving People Money on Health Care.

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TRAIL MIX | John Hickenlooper, Ken Buck epitomized their parties this decade - coloradopolitics.com

Mark Shields:

I think others are tempted to follow.

I think Lisa Murkowski, let's first acknowledge, she is unique. In the past 65 years, exactly one United States senator has won as a write-in candidate. She did that in 2010, after she lost the Republican primary to the Tea Party candidate backed by Sarah Palin and Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin and all sorts of other distinguished Americans.

And she came back and won as a write-in. So she stared into her political grave already. I mean, she knows. I mean, she's not a bed-wetter or a nervous Nellie, or whatever you want to call it, when it comes to anxiety.

So, I think that that gives her a certain independence that many of her colleagues in both parties don't have.

And I think I think it's significant. I think David's point about Mitch McConnell is an important one, that Mitch McConnell is strictly an inside player. He can't take it outside.

In other words, if it's a debate about outside, Mitch McConnell loses. He's a very formidable operator inside the Senate, sort of when nobody's looking in procedures and this and that.

But, I mean, this is a question. Are they going to just rush to judgment, ignore any witnesses, ignore testimony, and live by the lie which the president is telling, that is, I want these people to testify, I have forbidden them to testify, but I want them to testify, because I want it out in the open?

Well, you can't have it both ways.

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Shields and Brooks on 2019 in review, 2020 predictions - PBS NewsHour

Has a tiger come to tea at the Lupus film studios? No, but an equally disruptive guest has turned up. There are dozens of people beavering away on each floor of this smart London townhouse animators, producers, artists when my two-year-old daughter Romy arrives for a sneak preview of what theyre working on: an animated version of Judith Kerrs beloved childrens book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which turned 50 last year.

Providing a rampaging toddler doesnt accidentally unplug all their computers, the animated story of Sophie, Mummy and the unexpected stripy visitor who eats and drinks them out of house and home will air on Channel 4 on Christmas Eve. But rogue two-year-olds are not all the team has had to contend with.

Three months ago, says producer Ruth Fielding, the colouring process was proving so time-consuming she doubted they had the money or time to finish it. The swift recruitment of 20 students from Middlesex University solved that problem. There was also trouble over a scene from the book that shows the tiger picking up a teapot and pouring scalding hot tea straight into his mouth. We had to add a line for Mummy that says, Be careful, its a bit ... hot! says Fielding. It makes for a comedic moment, but it was actually borne out of Channel 4 worrying that it could be classed as imitable behaviour.

There was also, more sadly, the death of the storys creator, aged 95, in May. Kerr had been very involved: advising on the script, approving the cast, even chipping in on the precise shade of red used for Sophies coat. And, before all this, Lupus first had to convince Kerr they were the right people to bring her story which has sold more than 5m copies to the screen. The hand-drawn aesthetic that made their version of Were Going on a Bear Hunt such a treat helped their case, while the fact that Kerr was allowed to weigh in on the film was doubtless another factor.

Initially, there were a few more lines for the tiger, says Robin Shaw, the director. She wasnt having any of it and she was bang on. The Tiger only says two things in the book, but you dont ever feel hes lacking in presence or character. The minute you put words in his mouth, he becomes someone else.

Shaw hit it off with Kerr: theyd talk endlessly about pencils, lines, the use of perspective. He remembers telling her how clever it was that the Tigers eyes are always perfectly aligned with the vanishing points and the focus of the page.

And she said, Oooh, really? I didnt realise Id done that. says Shaw laughing. It was all natural for her.

Was it hard to carry on after she died? Of course it was sad she wouldnt be there to see it finished. But, in a strange way, it was motivating it made us want to do an even better job.

Its time to take a tour of the building. Romy has been temporarily distracted by a tea party the team have put on for her, so I sneak out with line producer Adam Jackson-Nocher. He shows me a vast storyboard pinned along the corridor, with each panel colour-coded to show where theyre all at. Its head-spinning stuff. There are 20,000 individual drawings all needing sketching, tidying, colouring and finessing to make this 24-minute film. Technology plays a part a nifty brush has been designed to paint instant furry tiger stripes but for the most part its drawn by hand.

The team talk me through a scene where the camera is looking down from the ceiling, spinning around as buns tumble towards the table. Computer-generated animation would speed things up here, but it would also give everything a consistent correct look and that is not how Kerr drew the book. Entire kitchen units would change or even disappear with a turn of the page, depending on how Kerr wanted things to look.

To make this charming inconsistency work, an 80-strong team had to draw under strict guidance, each fully understanding not just how the tiger should look but how he moved and what sort of character he was. Hes the Roger Moore of tigers, shouts Shaw from across the room. I laugh but it turns out hes serious: He breezes in, affects everyones life, manages to get exactly what he wants, then breezes out again leaving everyone feeling kind of used but happy with that. Hes a seducer, a charmer. Hell only do something if he wants to, and will only give something if it looks like he might get something in return. Completely selfish, but in the nicest possible way.

Its time to test the magic, so we head back to the tea party room for a screening. Things get off to an unpromising start when I walk in to find Romy ignoring the biscuits and fruit juice in favour of playing with the offices fancy Fortnum and Mason china tea set. I clench my teeth as she bashes the delicate cups together.

Then just as Im cursing myself for breaking the golden never-bring-your-child-to-work-unless-you-absolutely-have-to rule the screen catches her attention. Seeing the characters shes grown to love come to life mesmerises her, even though many have still to be coloured in. Occasionally, they disappear altogether, to be replaced by handwritten notes. Despite this, its clear the story hasnt lost any of the warmth of Kerrs original. The tiger retains the slight edge of menace that makes him so captivating, and theres excellent casting in the voices of David Oyelowo (Tiger), Tamsin Greig (Mummy) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Daddy).

To turn this very short story into nearly half an hour of animation has involved a bit of licence, most notably the addition of a glorious musical interlude sung by Robbie Williams, who fell in love with the book after reading it to his daughter, Teddy. Again, Kerr had an input into this musical passage, suggesting that its references to such foods as pizza were replaced by more traditionally British items, such as ice cream and chocolate cake.

Most people who have read The Tiger Who Came to Tea will have a favourite illustration. For many, its the evening scene after Daddy comes home and, realising theres no food left in the house, takes Sophie and Mummy out to a cafe. Sophie is dressed in her nightie, coat and wellies, but just behind her sits a stripy, ginger cat in the glow of the street lights. For Fielding, one of the animations key illustrations isnt actually part of the story instead, it features on the inside sleeve of some versions of the book. It shows Sophie and the tiger drinking lemonade together through straws.

There was a bit of a eureka moment when we were writing the script because we realised that Sophie could imagine what it would be like if the tiger stayed for ever. So she recreates him going to school and sitting on her bed, then comes to the realisation that actually it would be ridiculous you cant have a tiger at home. Judith responded really well to this idea, meaning were not confined to the four walls of the house.

Indeed, if the book itself is about one thing then its imagination. The huge amount of white space on almost every page invites readers to let their own minds run free. Perhaps this is why the story lends itself to so many different readings, from feminist ones (is the Tiger the male of the house who does no housework?) to Michael Rosens notion that the stripy visitor is an intruding Gestapo officer. (Kerr grew up in Germany but the family fled to Switzerland and then Britain as the Nazis closed in.)

When we first read the book to Romy, my wife was pregnant with our second child and it was hard to avoid the metaphor: here comes a new guest to upend the nice time you had planned with Mummy. But Kerr always insisted the story be taken at face value, that its about a childs most wonderful fantasies. Romys reaction is testament to that and ever since shes seen the tiger slinking around the screen she hasnt stopped wanting him to come for tea.

The Tiger Who Came to Tea is on Channel 4 on Christmas Eve at 7.30pm.

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'He's the Roger Moore of tigers!' how The Tiger Who Came to Tea came to TV - The Guardian

This article is part ofTPM Cafe, TPMs home for opinion and news analysis.

The decade that began in 2010 witnessed the gravest threats to the integrity of American democracy since the Civil War. It was the age of extreme polarization and political gerrymandering. It saw an unprecedent intervention in an American presidential election by a hostile foreign power and the advent of a dangerously self-serving president. Now it has ended with only the third impeachment of a president by the full U.S. House of Representatives in history.

In 2010, Democratic President Barack Obama achieved his greatest policy triumph when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. It was the only major social legislation enacted without the support of a single member of the opposition party and Obama paid a political price for this victory.

Obamacares opponents, led by a new and vibrant conservative movement that styled itself the Tea Party, dominated public debate and drove approval of the law down to the 40 percent range. The Tea Party advocated limited government, fiscal responsibility, reduced taxes, and its version of traditional Christian values, including opposition to abortion and gay and lesbian rights. Survey data indicated that between 10 and 30 percent of Americans identified with the Tea Party.

In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives and secured unified control of state government in nearly every swing state. They used that power to gerrymander state legislative and congressional districts during the redistricting process that followed the decennial census of 2010. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats won 51 percent of the statewide, two-party congressional vote in 2012, but Republicans captured 72 percent of the states 18 congressional seats. In Wisconsins 2012 elections for state assembly, Democrats won 51 percent of the vote, but Republicans won 60 of 99 seats.

Legal battles over these gerrymandered maps would play out through much of the decade. When federal lawsuits challenging gerrymandered maps reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019, a 5 to 4 majority ruled that the federal courts had no role to play in adjudicating partisan gerrymandering. Legal challenges would now focus on the state courts, where, Democrats won important victories in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Despite Obama defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney to win reelection in 2012, Democrats lost control of the U.S. Senate in the midterm elections of 2014. By this time the Tea Party movement had largely merged into the Republican Party, moving the party to the right and raising political polarization to the highest levels in recent history. Today, the most liberal Republicans in Congress are still more conservative than the most conservative Democrats.

When preeminent conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February 2016, President Obama nominated circuit court judge Merrick Garland to replace Scalia, which would have shifted the ideological balance on the court from 5 to 4 conservative to 5 to 4 liberal. However, the Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky refused even to give Garland a hearing. His nomination languished until President Donald Trump appointed circuit court judge Neil Gorsuch, which kept in place the Courts conservative majority.

In 2016 (as I predicted, contrary to the pundits and pollsters) Donald Trump won the presidential election. The Russians, under Kremlin direction, mightily assisted Trumps campaign by illegally hacking and releasing Democratic emails, placing ads on social media, and deploying trolls and bots to poison political discourse on Trumps behalf.

Trump appointed right-wing judges to judicial positions and pushed through Congress a massive tax that largely favored corporations and the wealthiest Americans. With few achievements in Congress, however, Trump largely governed by autocratic fiat. He withdrew America from the nuclear weapons accord with Iran, the Paris agreement on climate change, and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty that President Ronald Reagan had negotiated with Russia. His revamped immigration policy separated the families of undocumented immigrants, imposed a travel ban on residents of certain foreign nations, seized money from the military to build his border wall, eviscerated clean air and water regulations, and throttled back efforts to control catastrophic climate change.

The president quickly came under suspicion for collusion with the Russians during his presidential campaign. In May 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, admitting that he was thinking about this Russia thing when he did so. The firing led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate charges of coordination with the Russians and obstruction of justice.

To the disappointment of Trumps critics, Mueller produced an unreadable, 435-page report that was filled with equivocation and double negatives. Attorney General William Barr, a political appointee of President Trump, then poisoned the public dialogue by falsely spinning the report to exonerate Trump of any wrongdoing.

Still, Mueller had documented ten acts of obstruction by President Trump that, according to a bipartisan group of more than a thousand prosecutors, constituted a clear prima facie case of the criminal obstruction. But Mueller refused to take a stand, saying only, Ifwe had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime,we would havesaid so.

Mueller did not charge Trump or his associates with criminal conspiracy with the Russians, but he noted that the campaign welcomed and exploited Russias illegal meddling. He found that a lack of witness candor and a flawed production of documents hampered his conspiracy investigation. President Trump refused an in-person interview with the special counsel and answered written questions primarily by saying I dont recall.

Although Democrats had won control of the U.S. House in the 2018 midterms, the partys cautious leadership declined to follow-up the Mueller Report with an impeachment investigation of the president. Then Trump gratuitously forced the House to act by shaking down the new president of Ukraine, a nation dependent on the U.S., to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and the discredited Russian propaganda ploy that Russian interference in the 2016 election was a hoax concocted by the Democrats and Ukraine.

Chairman Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee has held weeks of hearings on the Ukraine scandal. He submitted a report to the Judiciary Committee which recommended articles of impeachment on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Houses charges will now be subject to a trial in the Senate under the Constitution. It remains to be seen whether the Republican-controlled Senate will hold a real trial with relevant witnesses or short-circuit the process to exonerate the president.

Allan J. Lichtman is Distinguished Professor of History at American University and the author of many acclaimed books on U.S. political history, including White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, FDR and the Jews (with Richard Breitman), and The Case for Impeachment. He is regularly sought out by the media for his authoritative views on voting and elections.

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The 2010s Were The Decade That Bent Democracy To The Breaking Point - TPM

After enjoying gains in the 2018 midterms, Democrats will pay dearly in 2020 for their impeachment push, predicts a longtime tea party activist.

Far-left Democrats successfully pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to support impeachment, and Democrats approved articles of impeachment despite the fact that nearly three dozen freshmen members of the caucus represent districts that voted for Trump in 2016.

Tom Zawistowski, president of the We the People Convention, insists the 2018 elections favored Democrats because Republican turnout was weak, and he predicts 2020 will be different.

In a presidential election, the turnout is going to be overwhelming, he tells OneNewsNow. There will be way more Trump people out to vote. So those people probably wouldn't have won anyway in 2020, even though they won in '18, and if they vote to impeach, they're going to be toast."

In an online commentary at American Greatness, Conrad Black says the American voters, not Democratic lawmakers, will determine Trumps re-election.

The Democrats started late, after years of huffing and puffing, he writes. They failed to impress anyone, came up empty, produced and passed a pack of lies as an argument for impeachment.

Zawistowski points out that several freshman House Democrats have been shouted down at town hall meetings by angry constituents, which he says is not typical behavior for conservatives despite what Democrats may say.

We're generally too busy working, he says. We're too busy taking care of our families, and our employees, and our customers to do this kind of stuff.

So the lesson for Democrats, he adds, is they pushed too far and frustrated Americans are pushing back.

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Prediction: Dems will endure voters' wrath in 2020 - OneNewsNow