Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
The election is over except in Louisiana, but the counting of the ballots isn’t, not even in Montana or the Flathead. Still, the election’s outcome becomes clearer each day, and some lessons are beginning to emerge.
The Daily InterLake reports that approximately 200 provisional ballots will be counted Monday. In theory, the outcomes of the House District 3 election, where Zac Perry leads Jerry O’Neil by 47 votes, and the 911 tax election, where the tax is down 85 votes, could be reversed. But don’t confuse possibility with probability. The likelihood that the provisional ballots will flip either race is only slightly higher than the likelihood that your neighbor’s cow will jump over the Moon.
That truth’s been known since 2006, when Jim Webb defeated George Allen after Allen called the tracker a macaca, which voters correctly interpreted as a racial slur. That knowledge didn’t deter Mitt Romney from slandering 47 percent of the nation as welfare bums in a speech he delivered to high rollers at a fundraiser in Florida. He thought he was off the record, but he was video recorded.
That score, trackers 2 GOP candidates 0, and the lesson therein, was lost on Iowa Democrat Bruce Braley, who thought he was alone when he told lawyers in Texas that if the GOP gained control of the Senate, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a farmer, not a lawyer, would become chairman of the Senate’s judiciary committee. But Braley wasn’t alone. One of Rising America’s trackers was there. Soon every farmer in Iowa, and there’s a double bushel of them, knew that Braley had, in effect, called Grassley a Dumb Farmer. So to teach Braley a lesson, they sent right wing crackpot Joni Ernst to the Senate to replace retiring populist Democrat Tom Harkin.
Take a tip, candidates of the future. Assume that everything you say is being recorded by a video tracker. And rest easy, trackers, you’re not out of business. There will always be politicians who say stupid things.
Mike Wheat beat him by a two to one margin despite all of the pro-Vandyke money that was shoveled into Montana by far right national groups. I find myself wondering whether the 100,000 mailers inflicted on Montana by rogue professors at Dartmouth and Stanford, and the ensuing media attention that was focused on the race, caused a lot of Republican voters to take a closer look at Vandyke and not like what they saw. Wheat, of course, had strong credentials as a fair and savvy justice, and legal credentials much stronger than Vandyke’s, and might have prevailed on the merits alone. But I think he also benefited from a significant Don’t Mess with Montana vote.
Now, let’s stop electing justices to the Montana Supreme Court. Have governors appoint them subject to legislative approval.
Democrats who are not angry and embarrassed at being thrashed don’t have a heart. And Democrat’s who wield long knives to settle intra-party scores don’t have a head. Back stabbing spills blood, but it doesn’t win elections. There are serious problems within the party, but neither panic nor purge will solve any of them.