Truth be told, state Sen. Josh Penry would rather not be here right now.

But the 31-year-old Republican is inside the Mesa State College student center anyway, warming up the room for his political rival, Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter, who is running late.

It's what you do when the governor comes to your district and invites you to introduce him.

"There is, I think, a basic expectation of civility," said Penry, a rising star in the GOP. "He is the governor at the end of the day. It is just reality, and so you deal with it."

Penry, dressed this October Saturday in jeans and a blazer, is running out of things to talk about. Just as he's wrapping up his thank-you-for-being-here to the audience, all heads turn to the back of the room. The television cameras start rolling.

The smiling governor, wearing an open-collared checked shirt, a blazer, jeans and a big brass belt buckle, has arrived. No one is looking at Penry anymore.

Until recently, Republicans across Colorado have stood on the sidelines like this, watching Ritter charm their constituents during visits to every corner of the state since taking office in January.

Fueled by a confidence-building 71 percent approval rating, Ritter says he travels to remind the people who put him in office that their concerns remain his concerns.

He also travels to market test an ambitious and decidedly Democratic agenda designed to address some of the state's most pressing and hugely expensive needs.

"Let's face it, he's a charismatic personality," Rep. Steve King, R-Grand Junction, said after touring the Mesa State College campus with Ritter. "But here very quickly he's going to be a charismatic person whose mettle is going to be tested. The rubber is about to hit the road."

Some say the rubber not only hit the road, but Ritter's momentum blew a flat when he issued an executive order at 3 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, recognizing unions in state government.

His executive order, which he crafted in secret, offered a big, red target at which Republicans could take aim.

Not surprisingly, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have different views on what impact, if any, Ritter's nod to organized labor will have on his political agenda. Even the independent pundits can't agree.

The big test starts in January when the legislature reconvenes. How much Ritter is able to accomplish during what House Speaker Andrew Romanoff predicts will be the most important and substantive legislative session in a decade will reveal much about the governor's ability to lead.

Jeans and open collars

Soon after he took office in January, Ritter set forth on a path to tackle the big issues of the day. Health care, transportation and higher education quickly shot to the top of his agenda.

Rather than come up with solutions on his own, the former district attorney assembled blue ribbon panels to investigate the problems and build cases for how to solve them. They were the legislative equivalents of grand juries, consisting of people with a variety of viewpoints and political leanings.

To sell his ideas and build political capital to drive them through the system, he quietly took to the skies and highways. In a stunning 92 trips across the state, he's met with community leaders of all political stripes. His pitch: Together we will make progress on the issues that matter.

"The thing you notice about Bill Ritter is how genuine he is, how he engages with people," former Republican Rep. Gayle Berry said while following the governor around the Mesa State campus. "You see him with the message of, 'Regardless of party, we're here to solve problems.' "

Berry paused to watch Ritter review a snapshot of himself and a student on the student's digital camera. "Look at how totally real that is," she said. "He's looking to make sure the picture turned out right."

On these trips, Ritter typically sheds his pinstripes for jeans and open collars. He seems more relaxed, more candid than he is in the state Capitol. He is Bill Ritter the guy next door, the family man who used to wake his kids up singing Johnny Cash.

He channeled his favorite country legend during a keynote speech last month in Grand Junction. He was among friends, telling an environmental group what Colorado had done about renewable energy under his leadership.

Then, saying he'd always wanted to do this, Ritter deepened his voice and stole a line from the country legend's album, At San Quentin.

"Could I have a glass of water?" he baritoned.

The roughly 250 members of the Western Colorado Congress loved it.

Earlier that day in Grand Junction, he met with a dozen owners and managers of small businesses, including two who run a uranium mine. He told them he had decided to try to solve the state's health care crisis, but that it probably would require putting a tax increase question on next year's ballot. If he couldn't forge consensus on how to tackle health care, he said, he probably would support a transportation tax question.

Perhaps trying to head off a fight with the GOP, he emphasized that if he supported a tax increase, it would be for just one issue.

Familiar debate

Ritter proved adept at putting out political fires early in his tenure.

His first test came in February, one month into the job, when the Democratic-led legislature passed a bill making it easier to unionize workplaces. House Bill 1072 drew an uproar from Republicans and the business community.

Ritter shocked his party's leadership by handing the bill his first veto, accompanied by a strongly worded veto letter. Calling the partisan debate over the measure "overheated politics at its worst," Ritter wrote that he hoped to bring the state together, to "give cynics reason to hope once again."

Penry and others personally thanked Ritter on the day of his veto. It became the symbol of Ritter's apparent willingness to lead in a bipartisan fashion.

But the "atta boy" from the GOP leadership didn't last long. Three months later, Republican lawmakers began sounding alarms about a bill Ritter helped push through the legislature to shore up the state's shrinking education fund.

Senate Bill 199 froze local property tax rates in most school districts, eliminating ongoing tax cuts that otherwise would have taken place under a 1994 school finance law.

Ritter warned that without his fix, the state education fund would collapse by 2011, forcing Colorado to prop up mandated funding of grade-school programs by draining money from higher education, social services and other critical state programs.

House Minority Leader Mike May said it was plain wrong for Democrats to sell the plan as a boost for local school funding. He predicted most of the money would be used to backfill other state programs.

Calling it a tax hike without voter approval, GOP lawmakers vowed to challenge the measure in court.

It was a good issue for Republicans, letting them cast Ritter as a typical tax-and-spend Democrat. They repeated the theme this month, when Ritter unveiled a budget with the largest spending increase allowed by state law.

Ritter's description of his budget proposal as a "moral document," however, proved to be a more compelling story line. Republicans and Democrats on the legislature's Joint Budget Committee mostly praised Ritter for suggesting that they boost funding for higher education, health insurance for kids and programs to help keep inmates from returning to prison after they had been freed.

One lawmaker asked Ritter how he would pay for the initiatives he had launched on health care and transportation. Like he had done in small town meetings through the early fall, the governor talked about asking voters next year to raise taxes.

In recent weeks, the GOP has floated its own ideas for health care and roads - without tax hikes. The legislature is setting up for a familiar debate over how much to grow government.

But the big flare-up right now is not over taxes. It's over Ritter's embrace of the union label.

The executive order

The son of a heavy-equipment operator who belonged to Operating Engineers Locals 3 and 9, Ritter worked his way through college and law school as a pipe layer and member of Laborers Local 720. As he wrote in his veto letter of HB 1070, "My sympathies lie with Colorado's working families."

He felt that, for too many years, state workers had been mistreated and ignored. He was convinced that the state had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on computer systems that those workers knew were faulty before they were purchased.

He had reversed an executive order from his predecessor, Bill Owens, that had banned automatic union dues deductions from state worker paychecks. But he wanted to do more.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees asked him to consider allowing state workers to collectively bargain for better wages and benefits. That had gone over well in New Mexico when it was enacted in 2003. But Colorado had always been a far more anti-union state.

Ritter became captivated by the idea of "partnerships" - something being pushed across the country by the powerful Service Employees International Union. Partnership legislation was like collective bargaining, but it revolved around trying to get union representatives and management to work toward common productivity goals.

Quietly, and in consultation with Democratic lawmakers, Ritter cobbled together a watered-down version of the "partnership" idea. He figured that as CEO of state government it was appropriate to impose partnerships by executive order.

Ritter's order prohibits strikes and binding arbitration, and allows the governor and the legislature to retain all budget setting authority. Still, it allows state workers to vote on a union to represent them and negotiate with management on "issues of mutual concern." Presumably those issues include wages and benefits.

"We now have a place to express our issues," said Dave Sanger, president of the Colorado arm of the American Federation of Teachers union.

Knowing his order could set off a political firestorm, Ritter reached out to Denver's influence makers before he signed the order. His chief of staff met with the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and, under a strict embargo, Ritter met personally with the publishers of the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post to try to sell them on the order.

Then, at 3 p.m. on a Friday, Ritter's communications office announced the order in a news release. That was an unusual technique for a governor who just the day before held a news conference on his budget proposal and was planning one the following Monday on global warming.

If the Friday afternoon release was an attempt to downplay the controversy, it didn't work.

Front-page firestorm

A rare front-page Post editorial that Sunday predicted Ritter's order would cripple his administration and turn him into Colorado's first one-term governor in decades. It called Ritter a "toady to labor bosses" and a "bag man for unions and special interests." The Rocky's editorial board called the plan a mistake "that threatens to raise the cost of government while reducing its ability to react to a changing environment."

Republicans immediately charged that with the stroke of a pen Ritter had squandered his political capital.

"Whatever good will he earned by vetoing the union bill last spring, it's gone - and then some," Penry said. "Because now everyone knows that the union veto was a dodge and a ploy, and that Bill Ritter can't say 'no' to the rabid elements of his base after all. Stack that on top of his property tax increase and a heap of other tax and fee hikes in the pipeline, and guess what: No one's afraid of Bill Ritter or his vaunted polls."

The GOP pledged to introduce legislation reversing the order.

Democrats downplayed the implications of the order. "I think some good may come of this executive order. I don't think the harms will materialize," said Romanoff. "At the end of the day, I think folks will remember whether we weaned ourselves off foreign oil, whether they stayed out of bankruptcy and whether their kids will go to college. That's what keeps people up at night."

Political observers ranged widely on their views.

"I think it is going to cost" Ritter, said Colorado College political science professor Bob Loevy. "I think it has cost him already." He noted that Colorado is not a strong union state, and said voters hadn't put Ritter in office to help unions.

While Ritter may suffer a "short-term wound," the public eventually will realize that the order doesn't do much for unions, said John Straayer, Colorado State University political science professor.

"I just think it's way too much sound and fury, way too much noise about something that does not seem to be that monumental," he said.

The following Monday, Ritter drew some attention away from the explosive debate by announcing an ambitious "climate action plan" to help reduce global warming. On Tuesday, he flew to Montrose, Durango and Pueblo to promote his proposed budget.

In a crowd-pleasing speech at Pueblo Community College, Ritter announced that he had reserved $3 million in his budget proposal to renovate the school's learning center. He spoke about a 10 percent increase for student financial aid.

After the speech, Jose Moreno, a student who uses a wheelchair, said he had not heard about the controversy in Denver over Ritter's executive order.

"To me that other stuff doesn't really matter," he said. "School - that's something else."

But that "other stuff" clearly matters to Republicans.

They say Ritter's union order proves he's a governor who can't stand up to special interests inside his own party. They worry that Ritter has buttressed unions' ability to raise more money for future Democratic candidates. They say Ritter has damaged his relationship with the business community, as well as his ability to lead.

"The business community is upset with the governor," said Michael Severns, president of the Mountain States Employers Council.

Severns complained that Ritter didn't seek input from the business community before issuing his executive order. And while he called the goal of improving government services "admirable," he said employee-management "partnership" agreements miss the mark. "It's a fallacy to believe the situation is taken care of through collective bargaining," he said.

Still, business groups differ on whether Ritter's support of unions will remain much of an issue for long.

"As businesses see the growing power of unions in state government, I think they're going to be far less likely to support the tax increases for health care, transportation and education," said Chuck Berry, president of the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry and a former Republican lawmaker.

The head of another business group sees things somewhat differently.

"It would be naÃve to say that (Ritter) has not damaged his credibility," said Walter Isenberg, a Democrat who is chairman of a nonpartisan group of influential business leaders calling itself Colorado Concern. "But we need to work with him, and we're moving on. There are so many more important issues. We need to drop the partisan bickering and do the right thing."

In Ritter's view, people care much more about how he will help lead the state to solutions on health care, transportation, higher education and other issues. He said engaging state employees through partnerships is only part of his agenda.

Ritter acknowledged last month - even before he issued his executive order - that his popularity could run into turbulence.

"The poet Kipling said, 'Treat defeat and victory as the impostors they both are,' " he said after delivering his Johnny Cash-inflected speech to the Western Colorado Congress.

"Polling can go up and down. I really don't put a lot of stock in anything other than making progress."

He added, "In Denver, we find Republicans who pull quips out of their jacket pockets when they are asked by reporters to say something about me, but not out here."

With that, he walked out of the hotel lobby and climbed into an unmarked State Patrol car bound for the airport. The night skies were clear for takeoff in Grand Junction, but he was heading for a snowstorm on the other side of the mountains.

What's on Ritter's agenda

Here are some of the issues the governor has addressed since taking office in January:

*Property taxes: A Ritter-backed bill freezes property tax rates in most school districts. The rates would otherwise decline, reducing the amount property owners pay in taxes. The purpose of the bill is to shore up the state education fund.

*Higher education: Ritter's proposed state budget increases higher education spending by $59.5 million to boost student financial aid and, it is hoped, slow the pace of tuition increases, among other things. Five of the state's colleges and universities would get $88.8 million for construction.

*Health care: Legislators and Ritter appointed a commission to come up with ways to get more Coloradans insured and do something about skyrocketing health care costs. The commission will complete its report in December.

*Transportation: Ritter named a task force that is studying how to build and pay for transportation projects. The task force is recommending a $1.5 billion spending increase.

*Global warming: The recently announced climate action plan calls for dramatically reducing electricity use, slashing the miles commuters drive to work, beefing up energy codes for new buildings and requiring that large emitters of carbon dioxide begin phased-in mandatory reporting of their emissions.

*School reform: A panel is studying education from preschool through post secondary, including dropout prevention, teacher preparation and student preparation for work or college.

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