To appreciate what a peculiar political script John Hickenlooper has written for himself, you could start in any number of places, with any number of situations.

Up in the air. You could start there. It was 2005; he was in his first term as mayor of Denver and despite a lifelong fear of heights, he parachuted from a plane — twice, because the first time wasn’t sufficiently photogenic — for a television commercial supporting two voter referendums in Colorado to permit government spending that he considered vital, lest the state go into free fall. His landing was safe: one of the referendums passed, a result better than many political analysts had predicted. Onward he rolled to the next set of challenges, the next series of stunts.

...

 Hickenlooper’s style has not only been fun-loving and freewheeling but also largely nonpartisan, and it has served him well. He decisively won election as mayor of Denver in July 2003, at the age of 51, despite no previous bids for elective office or experience in government. And he has had a remarkably successful administration, streamlining government, persuading voters to go along with a range of tax increases for projects like regional light rail and a new city jail and shepherding many homeless people off the streets and into newly built affordable housing. In 2005 Time magazine named him one of the five best big-city mayors in the country; in 2007 he won re-election with 87 percent of the vote. The pollster working on his 2010 gubernatorial campaign found that in the Denver metropolitan area roughly three of every four voters had a favorable impression of him. What Hickenlooper has enjoyed over the last seven and a half years isn’t so much a sustained political honeymoon as a round-the-world Love Boat cruise — with complimentary piña coladas nightly on the Lido Deck.

... for more see the article on the New York Times site.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/magazine/09Hickenlooper-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1