You won't glean much insight into Michael Bennet - aka, Colorado's next U.S. senator - from his early interviews with the media. He played it safe and never strayed outside the four corners of received Democratic wisdom.

You know the litany: We must redouble our efforts in one military quagmire (Afghanistan) while withdrawing from another. The Bush tax cuts were bad, but repealing them in a recession would also be bad, so we'll keep them for the time being even though they've got to go. Naturally, Bennet is a "huge believer in balanced budgets and in conservative fiscal management" while an equally fervent supporter of an $800 billion economic stimulus plan, and heaven knows what else afterward.

And, of course, he opposes a litmus test for judicial nominees but supports a president picking nominees who think like him, as if there's much of a difference. If there was even a mild surprise in any of Bennet's many answers, it had to do with the auto industry bailout, where he seemed skeptical of additional subsidies.

"I'm not yet convinced of how serious the industry is [about restructuring]," Bennet said. "I think the U.S. auto industry is incredibly important to our economy. And I think we have every opportunity to reinvent it, and to be able to have Detroit become a leader in the design and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles and vehicles that run on alternative fuels. But I want to see that, and I think a lot of people want to see that."

Even on this matter, however, notice that Bennet parrots notions that have become cliches among leading members of Congress - and which he really ought to reconsider. The Big Three's troubles have essentially nothing to do with their failure to become leaders in the "design and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles." Their cost structure is higher than their competitors because of pensions, labor contracts and other longstanding burdens; they have too many brands and an outdated distribution system; and they've had to battle the perception of lagging quality, at least on some models, compared with several foreign automakers.

If they'd never built a single SUV and tried instead to push smaller cars onto buyers in the 1990s and early years of this decade, they'd probably be in even worse shape today. Those SUVS, after all, generated profits. That's why they were built - oh, and the fact that the public wanted them.

After all, "the reason Europe has fuel-efficient cars is high gas prices, not CAFE laws," writes Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. "What's more, the only times that Americans have switched to smaller cars is 1973, 1979 and the spring of 2008, when gas prices here were high."

That's not to say Toyota's dominance of the hybrid market (70 percent of hybrids sold in this country have a Toyota nameplate) doesn't give it an advantage going forward, given consumers' shifting preferences, but that's hardly the Big Three's Achilles' heel.

The most troubling sentiment in Bennet's assessment of the U.S. auto industry is his belief that "we have every opportunity to reinvent it."

We as in whom? Congress? Egad.

I've listened to Bennet speak about education issues often enough to appreciate his intelligence and what I sense is an independent mind. And I really didn't expect to see evidence of the latter in these early days. But if he's going to make a case across Colorado for his election in 2010, he'll have to prove he's his own man. And what better way to achieve this than for him to trample on a few of his own party's shibboleths?

Once he's been safely sworn in, of course.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.