There’s no such thing as a disposable Trump voter

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 3 Comments
Voters

Voters

Life hack: skip the alarm by waking suddenly in the middle of the night to think about how Donald Trump is the next president. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last week, and it really cuts down on unnecessary neck mobility. It’s hard to decide which is worse: his presidency or the knowledge that people voted for him. Handed the reins of our democracy, a little under half of Americans failed to see a lying egomaniac for what he was. Or they did and thought, “At least he’s not a woman.”

It sucks to think about all the people who voted Trump, because the reasons they might have done so seem awful. In the search for the most likely explanation, the contest between misogyny and racism continues. If you prefer to think the best of people, the sunniest plausible narrative is that “economic anxiety” scared people enough to turn against the system but not enough to learn about it. If people only voted for Trump because they’re scared of going broke, they still couldn’t grasp the candidates’ platforms well enough to recognize their own interests. Economic anxiety voted to cut taxes on the rich.

Yet you cannot contemn these people, because we need them. Without at least some of the people who voted for Trump, you can’t put a women in the White House. You can’t make public college free. You can’t fix Obamacare. You can’t even keep a reality TV celebrity from taking the Oval Office. If we intend to run this democracy better, “half of voters are stupid assholes” cannot be our operating principle.

Racism, misogyny, and Republicans’ ongoing hypnosis of the white working class made a lot of people vote for Trump, but did they make every person vote for Trump? It’s dangerous to say there’s no such thing as a good Trump voter, because it puts the blame for this disastrous election on everyone the Democrats failed to convince. Maybe they’re not the problem.

If I could say one thing to the Democratic Party: It’s not our job to vote for you. It’s your job to convince us. Hillary Clinton and the DNC did a good job of convincing me to vote against Trump, but they never gave me a clear sense of what I voted for.

Trump said he would deport immigrants and watch Muslims. That’s disgusting and I voted against it, but what was Hillary’s counteroffer? The college thing was nice, although she kind of stopped talking about it after the primaries. More intervention in Syria sounded both bad and likely—more likely than financial regulation or taxing the rich. Her central promise was to continue the Obama legacy. In a year that saw 16 experienced Republicans wrecked by an anti-establishment bomb thrower, offering voters more of the same seems like electoral suicide.

In retrospect it seems that way. At the time, we all knew she was going to win. Now our comfort feels like complacency, and everything is fucked. Birds crawl along the ground as our blood flies up into the clouds. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Rumors about Bullock, O’Leary leap from blogs to newspaper

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
What's going on between Governor Bullock and this big check?

What’s going on between Governor Bullock and this big check?

Here’s a fun game: try to name the most prominent policy idea of the 2016 Montana governor’s race. Republican Greg Gianforte wants to improve the economy by—wait for it—lowering taxes and lifting regulations. Governor Steve Bullock wants to continue being governor. If ideas were glue, these two couldn’t build a model plane. But it doesn’t matter, because they’d gouge each other’s eyes out before they got all the parts out of the box. Their almost purely negative campaign got even darker last week, when NewsTalk KGVO ran this story, ostensibly about Bullock’s use of the state plane but also about how he uses it to take trips with cabinet member Meg O’Leary.

Rumors that there is something untoward about their relationship have circulated on conservative blogs for some time. Until last week, you never heard about it in the mainstream press, probably because there’s no evidence. But then KGVO ran the headline “Governor Bullock Brought Meg O’Leary to Paul McCartney Concert Instead of First Lady, State Plane Use Questioned.”

As usual when a headline uses the passive verb “questioned,” they omitted the phrase “by us.” A subsequent story in the more scrupulous Billings Gazette contradicted several of KGVO’s implications.  It seems like the original piece was pretty thinly sourced. It didn’t say much that hadn’t already been said—also without substantiation—in various right-leaning blogs. So why run it now?

Maybe it had something to do with the news that Oracle was moving 100 jobs from Bozeman to Texas. Gianforte sold his software company RightNow Technologies to Oracle in 2011. His success in creating high-wage jobs has been a major selling point of his campaign, but this layoff undermines that. Is it possible KGVO ran the O’Leary story to overshadow the layoffs? Although Gianforte’s communications director, Aaron Flint, has a friendly relationship with KGVO, it would be irresponsible to say he nudged them. I mean, what are we—KGVO?

You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I challenge the candidates to come up with some idea—any idea—related to policy. The voters of Montana deserve something better than a choice between negatives. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, hopefully including a fun surprise.

As Trump founders, Gianforte mailer strives to imitate him

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
The mailer Greg Gianforte, Republican for governor of Montana, sent last week

The mailer Greg Gianforte, Republican for governor of Montana, sent last week

Yes, that’s Governor Steve Bullock, letting terrorist refugees from war-torn stock photos just loom over the mountains of Montana. He refuses to use his power as governor to ban Syrians. Greg Gianforte, on the other hand, promises to stop refugee resettlement—presumably after he takes a job at the State Department, since the governor of Montana does not have the authority to prevent foreign nationals with valid visas from entering the state.

That’s one problem with the mailer above, which the Gianforte campaign sent out last week. Another problem is that it arrived in Missoula at roughly the same time as a family of refugees from the Congo, where Islamist militias are targeting Christians. Welcome to Montana, scared and exhausted family of six! One of our two candidates for governor has promised to prevent you.

The third problem with this mailer is tactical. I don’t know whether Gianforte or Bullock is ahead right now. No one does, because Montana is too big and empty to poll. But Bullock has the advantage of incumbency, and Gianforte has the disadvantage of the giant albatross perched atop his ticket. Donald Trump won the Montana primary with 74% of the vote, after all the other candidates dropped out. The candidate who got the most donations from individuals within the state was Ben Carson. Wild for guns and freedom though they are, Montana Republicans prefer a soft-spoken type. They’re ranchers and small business people, and the immigrants with whom they compete are mostly Canadian. A lot of them are likely to stay home this year, because the Republican candidate for president is a shit-eating wildman.

Why, then, would Gianforte emulate him with this mailer? Low-information xenophobes are already turning out. He should be pitching his appeal to the lifelong Republicans in this state who are disappointed in the top of their ticket. He should show the Rotary Club wing of his party why he’s still worth voting for, even if Trump isn’t. Arab-baiting appeals to public ignorance are not the way to do it. That’s what I think, anyway; only November will tell. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Judge overturns Montana contribution limits, making politics fun again

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 4 Comments
The whole state of Montana until yesterday

The whole state of Montana until Tuesday

You can’t hear it, but someone is lazily picking a banjo. The buffalo no longer roam, having decided one place is as good as another. The deer and the antelope play video games. Montana politics is sleepy, so sleepy. But then look what happens: a federal judge rules unconstitutional several elements of our campaign finance law. Suddenly, the dog sits up. As of Tuesday afternoon—three weeks before the primaries—political parties can contribute unlimited amounts to individual candidates. Judge Charles Lovell’s ruling seems to indicate that limits on donations from individuals and corporations are lifted as well, but Commissioner of Political Practices Jonathan Motl believes he must only revert to the limits in place before the ones Lovell struck down, in 1994.

Anyway, the last time this law was briefly overturned—for nine days in 2012—Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill accepted a $500,000 donation. Our easy slumber may have just been broken. I, for one, welcome the impending rush of cash into Montana politics. The 2016 campaign needs a shot of adrenaline. Why, just this week in the Missoula Independent, I wrote about how Bullock versus Gianforte has been a clash of tepid negatives. But the potential for political action committees of all kinds to spend unlimited amounts of money say unlimited amounts of speech ensures a vigorous exchange of ideas. So pander to me, boys. I’m all napped up.

With $300 million, Gianforte challenges governor to refuse PAC money

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
Televised advisor Dr. Phil, whose net worth is about half Greg Gianforte's

Televised advisor Dr. Phil, whose net worth is about half Greg Gianforte’s

Last week, Montana entrepreneur and admitted gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte challenged Governor Bullock to refuse donations from political action committees. Gianforte personally delivered the pledge to his office in Helena, although the governor was in Billings at the time. But no matter! The gauntlet was thrown down, by a man still holding approximately 300 million gauntlets.

After that public gesture, Gianforte told reporters he would take their questions not at all. Even the Independent, which previously ran a friendly interview from the state’s handsomest columnist, got shut out. Gianforte started the day with a stunt carried on every media outlet in the state and finished by telling us there was money on the dresser, so to speak. But we didn’t get any money. It was an insult our honor could not bear, and we repaid him by calling him a secret theocrat before he actually did it.

I understand why Gianforte mistrusts the press. Back when he told the Montana Bible College that Noah didn’t retire and that’s why he doesn’t believe in Social Security, we pilloried him for treating Genesis as policy. He explicitly told me he didn’t want to discuss religion in November. In January, Darrell Ehrlick of the Billings Gazette published this editorial complaining that Gianforte wasn’t talking about his faith.

I wish I could believe that his reservations on the topic were borne out [of] some modesty or humility. Instead, Gianforte may be reluctant to talk about his beliefs because then we might discover what he really believes—about gay people, evolution or any number of hot-button issues.

His reservation seem borne of the time we all made fun of him for three weeks, bro. Also, we know he believes a bunch of crazy stuff about gay people and evolution because there’s an (R) next to his name. These and other insights will reveal themselves to you if you read my column in this week’s Missoula Independent. If you don’t, who knows what will happen? Everyone but you, I reckon. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!