Peter Corroon has to carry Salt Lake County convincingly. John McCain can't choose Mitt Romney as his running mate. Barack Obama has to energize young voters. And, finally, Utahns have to take his candidacy seriously.
The first three are actually possible. That last one, however, might trip Bob up. Not because he isn't earnest and worthy. (He showed up for a meeting at Starbuck's in a seersucker suit, bow tie and bicycle helmet, state revenue spreadsheets and a New York Times in hand.) But because this is Utah.
Bob Springmeyer is a Democrat. Running against wildly popular Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. - a youthful first-termer with a telegenic multicultural family, a name out of Utah royalty and four years of relative good times on his resume.
Bob is being fed into the GOP woodchipper. And he knows it.
"If John McCain picks Mitt Romney, I can go fishing," he says.
It's nothing to be ashamed of. Other respected Democratic elders have gone before him - former judge Stewart Hanson, County Councilman Jim Bradley, former congressman Bill Orton.
"Nobody should go unchallenged into office," says Pat Shea, who lost to Hanson in the 1992 Democratic primary and signed up to be sacrificed a few years later in Orrin Hatch's bid for a fourth term. "That's contrary to how our system ought to operate. There needs to be an open, public debate."
Republicans are booked for the futility gig in Vermont. With few exceptions - the Salt Lake City mayor's race and a handful of city legislative seats, perhaps - Democrats do their duty in Utah. It's just Bob's turn.
Putting on his game face, State Democratic Party Director Todd Taylor isn't sending Springmeyer in to lose.
"We're preparing him to win. What we're trying to do is create the right circumstances for that to happen," Taylor says.
So with a cheeky campaign - green just-call-me "Bob" stickers, biting talking points from Taylor like "the race should be looked at as Bob Springmeyer versus Gary Herbert" and a strategy that depends on the national Republican malaise suppressing Utah's GOP vote - Bob is hoping to defy conventional wisdom.
He insists the governor is out-of-touch, weak, looking for a better job.
Huntsman's initiatives like the flat tax and the "right out of the [advertising] agency" 4/10 schedule could end up hurting average Utahns, he says.
Springmeyer totes a graph that shows Utah wages have not kept pace with the national average since Scott Matheson Sr. left office - "We're still the low-wage, part-time state." Income tax revenues are down $112 million this year. What happens next year when taxpayers don't get to choose between Huntsman's tax and the old way?
By the time his policies trickle down, Springmeyer says, Huntsman could be gone, tapped for a McCain administration.
"I don't think he has any concept of what average people are facing," Springmeyer says. "The idea that someone might need to take a child to day care at 6 a.m. didn't even connect. The thought that someone might be going to school and working didn't even register."
Huntsman's spokeswoman Lisa Roskelley counters with Utah's CNBC ranking as one of the "best places" to do business and the Pew Research Center's "best-managed state in the nation."
"Gov. Huntsman looks for government to be innovative and creative," Roskelley says. "This is a proactive way of looking at government in efficient ways."
Springmeyer still plans to poke at the governor's "popular-but-shallow" to-do list. He's running a "retail politics" campaign with would-be lieutenant governor sidekick Josie Valdez. A "Bob for governor" banner will buzz the Days of '47 Parade. He's hoping for two debates this fall. He has a "minimum" budget and an "optimistic" one.
"If there are three people gathered - I'm there," he says.
Only 2,649,997 to go.
walsh@sltrib.com
