17 August 2016
The MOU that Steve Bullock used to kneecap Nancy Keenan
There are two storefront operations for Democrats in the Flathead. One, operated by the Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, is in Whitefish. The other, in Kalispell, is operated by the Montana Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign.
Having two MDP campaign offices in the Flathead seems inefficient, and is, and there’s a story of iron fisted power politics behind it. The coordinated campaign is really Gov. Steve Bullock’s operation, which does things its own way. The official relationship of Bullock’s campaign is spelled out in a memorandum of understanding between the MDP and Friends of Steve Bullock that was reviewed and blessed by Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices at the end of last September.
The MOU kneecaps the MDP’s executive director, Nancy Keenan, who served as a legislator, as Montana’s superintendent of school, and headed the National Abortion Rights League for a decade:
Agreement. The MDP shall employ Eric Hyers (Hyers) to perform services described herein, and subject to the terms and conditions of this Memorandum of Understanding and Agreement.
- Hyers shall be responsible for directing both the Bullock for Governor Campaign, and the MDP’s Coordinated Campaign. Hyers brings particular experience, knowledge, and skills, based on his background and experience as an Executive Director of a state Democratic Party, as a Director of a coordinated campaign, and as a Director of a gubernatorial race.
- Although Hyers will not be subject to direct Supervision and control by MDP’s Executive Director, Nancy Keenan, with respect to his responsibilities for the Bullock for Governor Campaign and MDP’s Coordinated Campaign, Hyers shall consult and communicate on a regular basis with MDP’s executive director, Nancy Keenan, and/or other MDP staff, with respect to campaign activities and strategies for the 2016 election cycle. Consistent with the terms of this MOU and Agreement, Hyers is subj ect to direction and instruction from Steve Bullock with respect to his responsibilities for the Bullock for Gcvemor Campaign.
- Hyers shall be responsible for hiring and supervising field staff for the 2016 Coordinated Campaign.
There’s more, but those are the paragraphs that functionally subordinate the MDP to Bullock’s campaign, and make Bullock’s campaign manager, Eric Hyers, an intense young gun from Rhode Island, the de facto top dog at the MDC. Hyers likes doing things his way, and no other way, report Logicosity and others. Because he’s a mercenary who will fly away after the election, he can break all the china he thinks he needs to break to assure Bullock’s victory, leaving Keenan to clean up whatever mess he makes.
That’s why there are two Democratic campaign offices in the Flathead, and why Democratic regulars across Montana roll their eyes with sadness and exasperation when the coordinated campaign — by the reports I’ve received, a whip cracked operation where Hyers’ hires sweat more than they smile — is mentioned.
That Bullock has his boot on the MDP’s neck will not surprise students of politics at the state level. State political parties provide institutional permanence, but state political machines, always created and run by powerful politicians (a classic example was Virgina Democrat Sen. Harry F. Byrd), raise millions of dollars that provide the political muscle. Theoretically, we live in a participatory democracy in which political parties reflect the will of the people who adhere to their party's tenets and platform. In practice, thanks in part to choosing candidates through primary elections, our political parties are lapdogs and fronts for elected officials who are the modern day equivalents of feudal barons.
If Sen. Jon Tester runs for re-election in 2018, the Bullock-MDP dynamic most likely will repeat itself, with campaign mercenaries from afar riding roughshod over the MDP, possibility with another untoward multiplicity of campaign offices. The relationships on the Republican side of the campaign will be similar.
Political mercenaries win elections, but their ruthlessness comes with a cost paid not just by the party regulars they kick aside and humiliate, but by all members of a civil society. More on that in another post.
Note on a bad practice at Political Practices:
The PDF of the MCPP’s opinion and attached documents is a graphic image, a scan of paper copies of the original documents, which were written on computers. This is a truly nefarious and contemptible practice, beloved of lawyers and bureaucrats, that (a) obviates the ability of readers to search the document with their PDF reader’s find function, (b) makes selecting text as text instead of as a graphic impossible, and (c) can frustrate the indexing of the document by internet search engines. I was able to convert the PDF to text with an optical character reading application, but that workaround is not without drawbacks. If a bolt of lightning hits in Helena tonight, I hope it vaporizes the hardware and software MCPP uses to produce PDFs that are scans.