John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado and a Democratic candidate for President, is slim and clean-shaven, with an earnest, slightly surprised manner and stretchy facial features that can make him look a little bit like the actor William H. Macy. Amid the vast Democratic Presidential field, Hickenlooper, who is sixty-seven and served two terms as Colorado’s governor and two as Denver’s mayor, is near the median in terms of age and experience. He is not the only moderate (Joe Biden), nor the only pragmatic Rocky Mountain governor (Montana’s Steve Bullock) nor, in fact, the only Coloradan (the state’s senior senator, Michael Bennet, is also a candidate). So, although he has a slightly offbeat personal story (he worked as a geologist and then was a brewpub entrepreneur), it was not clear for much of the winter and spring what exactly Hickenlooper brought to the Presidential race. He seemed like an actor in search of a role.

On June 1st, Hickenlooper spoke to the annual convention of the California Democratic Party, in San Francisco, proceeding at a stately, teleprompter-friendly pace. “If we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals,” Hickenlooper said, and then leaned into the rest of the line, “socialism is not the answer.” He paused for a moment, and loud boos began to swell into the pause. “I was reëlected,” Hickenlooper started again, but the boos had not abated. The video clip went viral, giving Hickenlooper’s candidacy a shorthand, or the possibility of one: the Democrat willing to make the case against socialism. On Thursday night, the second night of the first round of the Democratic debates, he managed to wedge the argument into nearly all of his answers. His final statement concluded, “If we turn towards socialism, we run the risk of helping to reëlect the worst President in American history.”

I first met Hickenlooper in mid-June, at a loud midtown coffee shop, while he was doing a rapid media and fund-raising tour of New York and Connecticut before heading back to Colorado for Father’s Day. It seemed to me that some Democrat—Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or Elizabeth Warren, or a lesser-known candidate, like Hickenlooper —would inevitably have to make a case against socialism during the Presidential primaries, and I was curious to hear the embryonic version. Hickenlooper had attacked socialism before, in a speech, in New Hampshire, in May, but no one had booed and so no one had noticed. “We were not ignorant that this might cause an outcry,” Hickenlooper told me.

Curious about whether this was the reaction he’d been searching for, I asked Hickenlooper how he felt when he was booed. He took the question very literally. “When people booed me,” he began, and then he paused to summon a sense memory. “I’ve got some friends who are musicians, so on a couple of occasions I’ve gone out and played the banjo or sung at Red Rocks to ten thousand people, right? And I’ve felt how much energy there is when people really focus either appreciation or dislike. You get that emotional translation, it does kind of lift you up and push you back.” Then, searching for a sharper analogy, he remembered body-surfing as a kid, on the New Jersey shore. “It was a little bit like being in a wave and realizing this wave is stronger than I thought.” But, Hickenlooper said, he had spent considerable time working through policy ideas and figuring out why, for instance, he did not think single-payer health care was the best way to achieve universal coverage, and he felt confident in his position.

Hickenlooper went on, “So as the booing came up and was much louder than what I anticipated I didn’t shrink back. I kind of leaned into it and I kind of soaked it in there for a second. Even though having people booing you does not feel good. But I felt like I had a higher purpose. So when I spoke again I felt like I was, if anything, more in control of the moment than I was during the booing. The moment I started speaking, I felt like, I am in the right place at the right time.”

Socialism has become both an indispensable concept in the Democratic primary and a pretty fuzzy one. Shortly after Hickenlooper’s remarks went viral, Bernie Sanders delivered an address at George Washington University to explain his vision of democratic socialism, which drew heavily on Franklin D. Roosevelt and sounded to both trained and untrained ears quite a bit like an expansive version of liberalism. I asked Hickenlooper what he had seen from his fellow-Democrats that struck him as intolerably socialist—perhaps Medicare for All, or the more notional federal jobs guarantee that is embedded in some versions of the Green New Deal? “Those are two clear examples,” he said. “But I think massive expansions of government is a door for stuff that is certainly moving towards democratic socialism.”

Then Hickenlooper considered the enthusiasm for socialism from another angle. “Look, I can tell you where it comes from,” he said. “I think there is a deep-seated frustration that people don’t think they have a fair chance at creating a better life. I think that leads to some unlikely and in many cases problematic solutions.” He mentioned, as Democrats often do, that many workers have no more purchasing power than they did in the early nineteen-eighties. “If you’re not expanding the middle class, American democracy is not going to survive,” he said.

Hickenlooper is unusual in this Democratic field in that, until he was forty-nine, he worked in the private sector. “I’m probably the only person running for President who never even ran for student council,” he said. Hickenlooper spent his twenties and thirties working as an exploration geologist for oil companies—his territory was the awesome expanse of the Rockies—but was laid off in 1986 and was unemployed for more than two years. Hickenlooper went to a Department of Labor seminar, at which he was shown how to write a résumé and was given a list of other oil companies to apply to. But none of the other oil companies were hiring—the setback was industry-wide. Hickenlooper seemed to process this experience as an example not of the cruelties of the free market but of the inability of government to really help. “That became the foundation for what I call the fundamental nonsense of government,” he said.

During the time he was unemployed, Hickenlooper had plans to write for television, which didn’t pan out, and to open a brewpub in Denver, which came together slowly. “You do see a different person in the mirror than you’re used to. You don’t have the confidence. You’re kind of second-guessing yourself every day,” he recalled. But by 1988, he and three friends had opened Wynkoop, a craft brewery that helped to kickstart Denver’s downtown revival and played a role in making brewpubs a thing. “There was a level of uncertainty and anxiety,” Hickenlooper said. “If I’d gone for a couple of years like that, it’s very easy to see how bitter people can become.”

By now Hickenlooper had warmed to what seemed like his real theme—and the source of his instinctive revulsion at the word “socialism.” A focus of his nascent Presidential campaign has been workforce development: he likes to say that in the twentieth century we had too much human capital and too little financial capital, and now it is the other way around. He began happily discussing his approach, as governor, to rural economic development, a “bottom-up” economic plan that relied heavily on partnerships with business. In every county, Hickenlooper’s office built a list of stakeholders, “not just the Chamber of Commerce people, but the people who ran the community health center, and the people who worked in the clerk’s office. The schoolteachers and principals. We got everyone in a room to say—two- or three-hour meetings—‘What’s your vision?’ ” Hickenlooper said proudly, “That’s an entrepreneurial approach.”