New Yorker Feature Story on Politics in Colorado and Governor Bill Ritter

Its a a sure sign that the national political and economic profile of Colorado and the Intermountain West has risen when The New Yorker does a lengthy feature story on the state's politics and current Governor Bill Ritter. However, as evinced by the picture below from the beginning of the article, the cowboy metaphor will probably always stay with the region.

Picture above from September 1, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

The following excerpt from the article provides an overview of the economic changes in the region and refers to the recent Brookings Paper on the "Mountain Megas" in the Rocky Mountain Region.

"The Front Range is expected to have 6.3 million residents by 2040—a fifty-per-cent increase over today—and demographers have devised a new vocabulary to describe the distinctive characteristics of this and similar regions in the Southwest...The fastest-growing suburbs in these areas, such as Westminster and Lakewood, outside Denver, are known as 'boomburbs. What these megapolitans have in common are economies that are moving away from agriculture and the extraction industries (like mining, gas, and oil) and toward service industries (like tourism and hospitality) and high technology (like aerospace and biosciences). According to Brookings, the region will soon become the center of the postindustrial economy, meaning that 'the southern Intermountain West is well on its way to earning itself the title of the New American Heartland.'"