Montana Senate: bye, bye Burns.

What is there about ‘big sky’ country anyway?

Just the other day I was recalling how a television ad featuring “talking cows” helped save Doc Melcher’s U.S. Senate seat in 1982. But the cows couldn’t save him from the bull handed out by Missouri carpetbagger Conrad Burns in the 1988 election. Burns attacked Melcher where it hurt—called him a “liberal soft on defense and very high on social programs.” You can imagine how damning that was in Montana. Also, voters were told Melcher had “been in Washington too long” and it was time for a fresh face. Following the GOP playbook in an era of too many Democratic incumbents, Burns became a strong advocate of “term limits”.

When he ran for re-election in 1994, his opponent’s name was Mudd – Jack Mudd. Burns won in a landslide.

When 2000 rolled around, big surprise! Burns said he had “re-thought” his position on term limits, that he would break his promise to hold office for only two terms. Said he felt it simply wouldn’t be fair to deny Montanans the impact his experience and influence would have on big-time Washington movers and shakers. He was right. Years later when the Jack Abramoff scandal broke, Montana was a major player, thanks to Conrad. Records showed he was the single biggest recipient of Abramoff money conned out of the Indian tribes.

In 2000 Conrad barely won in a nasty campaign against a rancher from Whitefish, Montana named Brian Schweitzer, a real piece of work and currently Montana’s governor. Burns has an archaic view on health care given him by drug lobby campaign contributors, so Schweitzer underscored their differences by organizing busloads of senior citizens to take trips to Canada for cheaper medicine. Burns had a customary graceful retort, insisting that senior citizens went to doctors “to have someone to visit with—there’s nothing wrong with them.”

With the Abramoff cloud having over his campaign and Indian tribes on the warpath, Burns faces a tough test this fall. His challenger is Jon Tester, State Senate President and organic farmer. A burly, broad-shouldered man with flattop hair and a friendly smile, Tester is seen by Democrats as “the perfect candidate” to take Burns on.

As expected, Burns quickly attacked Tester on issues that keep working families in Montana awake nights: gay marriage, the estate tax and flag burning.

Burns even spent some of the Indian tribes’ Abramoff money on a TV ad ridiculing Tester’s flattop haircut. In the ad, “Tester” sits down for a trim and a “barber” with a southern drawl tells him he’s “gonna need a lot more than a haircut to cover up” his liberal views.

The ad may have pleased Burns supporters, but it enraged Tester’s real barber, 70-year old Bill Graves. “I was fairly mad when that ad came out,” said Graves, practically spinning in his chair at the Riverview Barbershop. “That guy in the ad isn’t a barber. He’s an actor and he’s never touched Jon Tester’s hair.”

Earlier this year, Burns was selected by Time as one of “America’s Five Worst Senators”, calling him “serially offensive” for many controversial statements he has made throughout his career such as calling Arabs “ragheads”.

This is a Senate seat the Democrats should pick up in November, flattop and all. And keep an eye on that guy Schweitzer in the state house.

Negative Campaigns: Thank you for not voting

David Mark who should know better (he’s the former editor of Campaigns and Elections magazine) writes in a new book that negative campaigning is an “art”. There was a time I might have agreed with him, when media experts were producing blockbusters like the “Daisy” spot that doomed Barry Goldwater’s presidential hopes in ‘64. Negative ads were funny, horrific, memorable. Now they’re just mean and nasty and absurd, even when they’re effective, as they were with the Swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004.

Mark, in his book Going Dirty: The Art of Negative Campaigning, has a chapter on the impact of negative ads on voter turnout. He says academic research is split. “Some studies suggest negative campaigning drives up voter turnout because it gets people angry. Others conclude the practice turns people off.”

The recent California primaries would indicate the latter, featuring some of the most obnoxious, stupid and clumsy negative campaigns ever, with a lot of weird thrown in. (Example: One ad attacked Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza for refusing to send her children to public schools. She has no children).

Such idiotic campaigning resulted in one of the lowest voter turn-outs in California history. Not that there weren’t some exciting races, including the top of the ticket-- the Democratic gubernatorial shoot-out between state treasurer Phil Angelides and state controller Steve Westly was a real nail-biter. They pummeled each other daily with attack ads that often protested the other’s negative ads. Rather than inspiring a rush to the polls, the $80 million barrage left voters weary and confused…and at home on election day.

In my 1997 book, Poison Politics: Are Negative Campaigns Destroying Democracy?, I made the point that “a more dangerous problem is the increasingly cynical attitude toward government that is poisoning our politics and causing many voters to give up and stay home.”

Three years later this “cynical attitude toward government” trend I had warned about became a full-blown political nightmare when the GOP far right took over the federal government with stunning ineptitude. Deliberate ineptitude, according to Alan Wolfe in the current Washington Monthly.

Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of Does American Democracy Still Work?, writes that the credo of the Bush administration is that “if government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it…the end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.”

Or as Bush himself would put it: “You’re doing a great job, Brownie.”

GOP Umpires: You vote, they decide

Why does the NCAA have stricter standards for officiating college football than we have for officiating Presidential elections? In bowl games the NCAA won’t even allow the referees to be from the conference of either team. Shouldn’t we care at least as much when it comes to the refereeing of our national elections?

What stirs all this concern of course was the outrageous home cooking served up by zebras doing the officiating in Florida and Ohio in the last two Presidential elections. Secretaries of State Katharine Harris in Florida in 2000 and Ron Blackwell in Ohio in 2004 enthusiastically threw flags penalizing Democratic voters while serving as chairs of the Bush presidential campaign.

For a nation trying to bring democracy to the Middle East, doesn’t this sound like politics in a banana republic?

When the referee interpreting and enforcing election laws wears the opposing team’s uniform, you get uneasy. One thing Harris and Blackwell have done is create new interest in the formerly drab role of Secretary of State. I can remember when the witness protection program afforded more personal publicity and recognition. Until the nail-biting 2000 Presidential election where it came down to Jeb Bush’s Florida, hardly anyone knew or cared that in addition to licensing private eyes and protecting the state seal the Secretary of State also is charged with overseeing elections. And there was Katharine Harris, with layers of makeup and Wonderbra, ruling for the home team.

In swing states all across America, ambitious politicians saw where career advancement really lies and began filling out forms to run for Secretary of State. It is still the best non-job in state government. No stress, no heavy lifting. Just bide your time for stardom while using the opportunity of statewide office to travel about the state scarfing down barbeques and cutting ceremonial ribbons.

In Florida and Ohio, Harris and Blackwell became cult heroes within their party.

Harris was rewarded with a safe congressional seat and is now running for the U.S. Senate. Blackwell, whose interpretation of election laws disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens (predominantly minority and Democratic voters) is now his party’s candidate to succeed Bob Taft as Governor.

Blackwell is a master at suppressing voter registration and has given a whole new meaning to “machine politics”. Before the 2004 election he worked very hard to install Diebold voting machines throughout Ohio, arousing suspicions among Democrats as to how secure and how accurate those electronic devices might be when the company’s chief executive promised in a fund-raising letter to help Ohio deliver the election to Bush. As we all know, Ohio turned out to be the cliffhanger that throughout a long night could go either way. When all the votes were counted (or not counted) Bush had won Ohio and the election. Newspapers launched a series of investigations to try to explain all sorts of weird and mysterious electronic malfunctioning that occurred election day, but machines don’t leave a paper trail.

One thing we know is that all across the Buckeye state election day voting machines were behaving in peculiar but apparently pre-ordained fashion. Machines in predominantly Democratic precincts failed to record votes, others simply failed to function, and one in Franklin County recorded 4,258 votes for Bush from 638 voters. Can you top that? Well, maybe. In Alaska this year, the state Division of Elections refused to turn over its electronic voting files to Democrats trying to verify 2004 election results riddled with discrepancies. The state argued that the data format belongs to a private company (Diebold again) and can’t be made public. So there you have it; a public election paid for by taxpayers who aren’t allowed to see what went on behind the curtain.

As bullish as I am about Democrats regaining control of the Congress this fall, I’m having some concerns about partisan voting machines and referees.

Election 2006: Swann dive in Pennsylvania

The latest high draft pick by a Republican party desperate to find appealing candidates for public office is Lynn Swann, one-time Super Bowl MVP for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

When the going gets tough, the Republican party turns to celebrities --athletes and movie stars-- to bail them out. It worked out well for them in California, with Ronnie and Ahnold. But Pennsylvania voters appear to be having second thoughts about Swann in his campaign for Governor.

Their logical candidate to take on incumbent Democrat Ed Rendell was Bill Scranton, the former Republican lieutenant governor. Yes, that Scranton. Son of the revered former Governor, a true party icon. But not exciting enough to beat a Clintonian campaigner like Rendell. At least that was the call made by party bosses who simply threw Scranton overboard without so much as a “thank you” for all his contributions to the party.

Despite this shabby treatment, Scranton stayed in the race. That is, until early February when the Steelers won Super Bowl XL. That triggered TV re-runs all across the state of Swann touchdown catches from his MVP days, giving his gubernatorial campaign a super glow. Scranton quietly departed the campaign.

(Just three months later in the Republican primaries, the same party leaders who engineered Swann’s endorsement were themselves thrown over the side by angry voters. It wasn’t the Swann backroom deal that did them in, but a midnight pay raise the legislators had given themselves. Somewhere, Bill Scranton was smiling).

In those early weeks, pollsters had the Swann-Rendell race a toss-up. But as the image of Swann, the gifted wide receiver, gradually morphed to that of Swann, the fledgling politician clueless about the issues, the celebratory mood began to fade. His substance-free campaign even annoyed the conservative Weekly Standard, whose reporter came to Pittsburgh to praise him and left “with a sinking feeling. He could probably deliver a message, if he only had one.”

In an effort to remedy that, Swann reached into the right-wing playbook and came up with a golden oldie right out of single-wing, leather helmet days: Proposition 13--the Jarvis-Gann initiative that cut California property taxes in half and transformed a world-class educational system into a fiscal mess. Experience has shown Prop 13 to be not only a disaster for public education, but patently unfair: owners of similar properties pay dramatically different taxes for the same services only because they bought them at different times. Perhaps Swann’s campaign was better off when it was substance-free. At least Pennsylvania school children were.

The most recent polls show that Swann the former Steeler is still wildly popular, but Swann the potential governor is dropping like a rock. After being neck-and-neck in four previous Rasmussen Reports, Rendell now holds an 18-point advantage. Swann’s support in his own party has fallen to 59% while 76% of Democrats favor Rendell.

What’s worse for Swann, the election is in November and the Steelers can’t get into another Super Bowl until next January.