He borrowed about 10 young, roughly 50-pound porkers from a local farmer, gathered them outside the restaurant and prodded them to scurry down a short alley and around the block, for an event that he described as a “running of the pigs.” Over subsequent years he repeated the event and it grew in popularity, drawing more notice and, perhaps inevitably, complaints from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

So he made an adjustment. He refashioned the swine stampede into the “pleasuring of the pigs.” The animals were coaxed along gently and coddled all the while. “We used parasols, little sun hats — we made sure there was no sun on the pigs,” he says. “People would feed the pigs little treats along the way.” Still, PETA representatives complained, telling Hickenlooper he was “objectifying and making a spectacle of pigs,” as he recalls. They videotaped one year’s pleasuring, he says, and “one pig caught its hoof in a grate and had a little drop of blood on its hoof.” To head off the dissemination of that image and put an end to PETA’s protests, he shelled out about $400 to buy all 14 pigs that had been used in that pleasuring and sent them to a refuge for rescued livestock, where they could grow fatter and older without fear of becoming bacon. And the next year, he says, with a sigh, “We did a celebration of prairie dogs.”

He was a few years shy of a political career at that point, but the politician was clearly in him, and many of the factors behind his emergence as the top Democrat in Colorado, a fractious political battleground and one of the country’s most glaringly purple states, were firmly in place. Hickenlooper has long had a knack for promoting himself, but in ways too clownish and just plain good-natured enough to come across as conventionally scheming. He’s a virtuoso goofball, and he’s much more inclined toward accommodation than confrontation. In the restaurant business, he often says, he adopted a philosophy that he has carried into other aspects of his life: there is no percentage, none at all, in making and motivating enemies.

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.

But can it last? Colorado is much more ideologically diverse than Denver itself, home to both the backpackers of Boulder and the Bible thumpers of Colorado Springs, and it’s in deep fiscal trouble. Hickenlooper will cross the lawn between City Hall and the State Capitol — they face each other across a picturesque park downtown — to encounter a budget shortfall of roughly $1 billion for the coming fiscal year and an obligation, written into Colorado law, to balance the books. Like chief executives far and wide, he must cut and cut and then cut some more, and he must do so in concert with a divided Legislature in which Democrats control the Senate and Republicans the House.