The 30,000 Foot View

Last Friday, May 15th, 2026, after much pressure from many on the right, including a symbolic pardon from President Trump, Colorado Governor Jared Polis gave clemency to political prisoner, Tina Peters.

While many on the right have celebrated this move, Polis’ own party, the democrats of Colorado, have condemned the decision strongly. Even voting to censure him.

While most people take a side and do their best to point out the obvious, I want to take a moment and present another side that many might not see.

Early on in my business life, I was dealing with a situation where I had an upset sales consultant. He was upset because he thought he had qualified for a sales contest that I had put up by selling above what the required sales quota was.

The contest was set for presentations and sales. Meet the required number of presentations and the required number of sales and you win the contest. Even though the consultant had met the sales quota, he was far short of the presentation requirement. Little did he know that I had placed the presentation requirement into the contest because of him. Being one of my best sales reps, I wanted to get more out of him. I knew that if he had completed the required number of presentations, that he would have metaphorically blown his previous months sales out of the water!

As a business owner, and leader of a sales organization, it was my job to get the best out of every person that worked for me. Sometimes it took tricking people into being successful.

All too often, when you have a talented sales person in a 100% commission based industry, the best sales people tend to only do the minimum. They do only what they need to do so that they can pay their bills and cover their expenses. On the opposite side though, there are often sales people that will out work the talent and sell circles around them. The reason they out sell is because they out present.

The point of this story is that talent doesn’t always win. Hard work often prevails.

The correlation is that there is always a side that we may not see.

When the upset sales representative wanted to argue with me that I wasn’t being fair because he had met the sales quota, I simply told him, “look, fair is fair for both sides. Not just for you or for me.”

When we take a moment to step back from every situation, pause, and look at the big picture, many times we see something that we may not have seen initially.

The situation with Jared Polis and Tina Peters is no different. The tendency is to look at the argument from one side or another. The democrat side or the republican side. What if there was a third side? A side that most people don’t see?

So many of us are so wrapped up in our point of view that we can’t see the forest through the trees.

I like to say that there are 3 sides to every story. Your side. My side. The right side.

Now before you shoot me down and argue that there cannot possibly be a side other than Polis did a good thing or a bad thing; depending on which side you stand, and before you try and argue that the democrats are eating their own, while Polis is just showing sympathy; while the governor get censured.

Lets take a look at another side. Not that it is necessarily a right side. Just another view.

In many presidential and vice presidential conversations, Jared Polis’ name has come to the forefront. In fact, in 2024, his name was being brought up often as a potential running mate with Kamala Harris. Ultimately, Tim Walz of Minnesota received the nod.

If you have paid any attention to politics over the past few years, you may have noticed that the buzz words or buzz phrases being tossed around like “Far Left” or “Far right,” “MAGA” republicans” or “Leftist democrats,” have been used to describe anyone involved in politics. However, since the January 6 protest that saw many innocent Americans become political prisoners, like Tina Peters and the “J6 Praying Grandma,” Rebecca Lavrenz; many politicians and even every day citizens have tried to rebrand themselves back towards the center.

Chuck Norris said it best before he died when he said that the reason he left the democrat party was because they had become so far left. “The Democrats believed 40 years ago what the Republican party believes today.

Because of the stark contrast, many politicians are doing their best to rebrand themselves as more centered politicians. Colorado politics is no different and you can see it in the voter rolls. As of March 1st, 50% of the states voters are made up of unaffiliated voters.

One could argue that the left has gotten so far left and the right has gotten so far right, that voters just want to be normal.

The unaffiliated party, if that is even a thing, looks to have gained some attention, and politicians are taking notice. The more they can gravitate back to the center, the more unaffiliated votes they might get.

So lets bring this to the third side of the story. The side that might not be getting much attention.

As Jared Polis prepares to leave the Governors office at the end of the year, the question of “what’s next,” still lingers. With conversations about potential Presidential or Vice Presidential runs in the future, a course correction from a far left leaning track record to a picture of a sympathetic, unbiased leader could be a possibility.

In the current race for Governor, on the republican side, we have seen the messy, controversial past of Victor Marx, cause problems for their campaign. The Democratic side of the aisle is no different.

When the wrong thing is said, or the wrong thing is done, it can mess up an entire campaign and it can cause a future run to fail before it gets off the ground.

It reminds me of a scene in the movie “The Patriot” where Mel Gibson’s character says, “I have long feared that the sins of my past would come back to haunt me.”

Politics is a messy game. Every move needs to be calculated. Every decision thought out. Every negative headline avoided.

What will the future hold for Jared Polis? Right now we don’t know. But the internet may say in the future that Jared Polis showed compassion on Tina Peters. It may tell a different story than being censured by his own party. It may tell a different story then Tina Peters spent four and a half years in prison for doing her job to protect election integrity.

Whatever story ends up being told, when we take a view from 30,000 feet, we see that there are more than two sides of the story.