For some masochistic reason I was drawn in by the Montana special election … just in time for the body-slamming of a reporter by a candidate … who would then cruise to victory.
From afar, I don’t know how many conclusions one can draw. Montana isn’t really a blood-red state. Steve Bullock beat Gianforte for governor. They still have Jon Tester in the Senate. They had the eccentric Brian Schweitzer and the mediocre Max Baucus.
Add that to the following:
- Gianforte was an ugly, compromised candidate: A rich guy from Jersey with financial ties to Russia.
- Bernie Sanders came in to support Rob Quist the Democrat …
- … who ran on the hideousness of Trumpcare and protecting public lands — not so much on Gianforte’s personal shortcomings. Quist didn’t even mention the assault, right after it happened!
And then there was the body-slam.
This says very, very discouraging things about the character of voters themselves. There is nothing new about people voting for a thug, as long as the guy is “our thug”: Buddy Cianci, the Providence mayor imprisioned for sexual torture of a rival, then re-elected, comes to mind.
But I tend to look at things through the lens of culture, not class politics. This says that progressives have completely lost the cultural thread in places like Montana. They are dominated by right-wing media from various sources — from Lee Enterprises owning the newspapers (which endorsed Gianforte), to Sinclair owning the TV stations (the local NBC affiliate refuses to cover the body-slam), to Rush and his spiritual children on the radio and Fox on cable. Also, the GOP spent a lot more money.
So what do I make of this? The work we have to do is on the cultural level. It has been posited that a health care, nuts-and-bolts class-based message can win the coveted white working class. It has been posited that Bernie Would Have Won; that it’s a new era where politics is nationalized and that only his message can win.
Those things would make me personally very happy. But I see little evidence of them yet. When a plutocratic, compromised, demonstrably violent candidate can win with a shrug, I become pessimistic about the ethical and cultural character of the voting public. And I surely don’t believe that the future of the Democratic Party lies in the false dilemma of last year’s primary.
The hole is deep.
It is depressing. I’ve heard that two-thirds of the votes were cast before the assault though.
The assault happened Wednesday evening, prior to voting day, which was on Thursday. So unless two-thirds of the votes were absentee ballots, I kind of doubt it.
There is a kerfuffle brewing with the local NBC affiliate who pointedly did not cover the incident in their Wednesday night news, citing ‘journalistic integrity’ in trying to verify the story… which is passing strange because the incident occurred in the presence of at least three other journalists, all of whom made statements to the police…
Nope. You were right. Montana has ‘early voting’ and it is estimated that 70% of the votes were cast, prior to the assault.
My apologies for shooting my mouth off before checking..
The GOP succeeded in making politics a matter of tribe, not policy. It’s a lot harder to divide people from their social group. It takes a major amount of cognitive dissonance.
This strikes me as a decisive argument against early voting.
When it happened, the guy straight-up lied about it and said the reporter attacked him; and then forgot about that and apologized the moment the last vote was counted. And there is no backlash of any kind, because apparently assaulting the media pisses of the libruls.
I share your pessimism.
I’m not at all convinced of this as a reason not to vote “early”. I think it’s more of a decisive argument for a clear beginning and a hard stop to campaigns: ending campaigns well before the voting starts is both saner and more democratic. Limiting the voting to allow unlimited campaigning strikes me as the cart well before the horse. I’d rather limit the campaigning to allow more freedom to vote.
Besides that, after the ‘access holywood’ tape leak, I’m not at all certain that this behavior would be punished, even had the early voting not taken place… The GOP has long shed the genteel veneer of ‘aw shuck’ geniality that Nixon projected, Reagan perfected and Dubya perverted in favor of the outright hostility and knuckle-dragging thuggery of the Gingrich/Trump model… this is just a more straightforward and forthright example of that.
How do you make a campaign end? Stuff happens right up until election day. Sometimes it happens in campaign events, sometimes not. I don’t think it matters. Certainly if the guy got into an argument at a bar and body slammed someone 2 days before the election I’d want to know about it before I vote. Any number of things can happen after the so called official end to a campaign that would be important to know about. What is so sacrosanct about early voting?
You say the campaign is over. You’re done. Make a law that says you campaign starting on this date and ending on that date. Election to follow some period of time after the latter date.
Why not a “cooling off” period?
Stuff happens after election day, also. Gianforte may body-slam somebody next Tuesday.
If the voting is treated as more important than the campaigning then we wouldn’t even need to qualify it with the term ‘early’… it just becomes just voting. Campaign for a month, wait a week, vote. What’s wrong with that?
Agree with Petr. Very common in Europe. A big reason the Macron dump didn’t have the impact Comey’s leaks did is because the French media were actually prohibited on reporting it due to the coverage blackout. A coverage blackout would be an unconstitutional non-starter here-but it’s a good idea.
Frankly our media probably needs to cover campaigns and the horse race less and cover the issues themselves more.
I think a media blackout is different from a campaign of proscribed length, though my thinking is that a campaign of proscribed length would include media ad buys. .. so there’s that.
More of what I thinking of, though, and independent of journalism about the campaign/election is something like a law that says campaigning can’t start before, say July 1 and cannot extend past October 28th. Then a week goes by where all the candidates have to STFU and on November 4, the voting happens. Even better, I think, than voting only on November 4 (and thereby qualifying any vote that happens prior as ‘early’) would be the same scenario except voting extends from November 4 to November 11. One whole week (if not more). So it would be 3-4 months of campaign, one week of ‘cool down’ and then one week, at least, of voting.
The First Amendment would like a word.
How very meta…
Considering that this First Amendment might speak through you, for this word, what would it say??
Whatever your muse of the 1st A might say, I’ll be tempted to reply that what I offer is a temporal, not geographic, ‘free speech zone’: that is to say a length of time that is cordoned off, as is done with space, at the present.
I don’t particularly like that offering, but it has existing precedent to it… so there.
I think that there are better arguments, such as outright bans on ‘incitement’ and ‘fighting speech’ (both of which I thought the Trump campaign fell afoul of, often.) as well as the ‘diminished protections’ given to commercial advertising and employment… and since an election campaign is essentially one long advertisement for employment, it’s entirely kosher to apply those standards as well.
Geez, you guys sell your civil liberties cheaply. A “temporal free speech zone” is Orwellian euphemism for government censorship, and nothing more.
One would imagine that, given the present control of our government, putting political speech and media under state control would not be something to be desired, but I guess there is no accounting for taste.
Yeah, I recognize what it looks like. I don’t like it. But I guess I’m in the position many women were in just over a hundred years ago… And we have ‘temporal free speech zones’ now, with respect to age, both against children and candidates.
But, to make it even more meta… The founding fathers placed burdens on the government and directed the people to determine who gets in the government. Labelling attempts to make that cleaner and more forthright as ‘government censorship’ might as well be stark originalism.
I get that you think the conflict is between censorship and free speech. I don’t think that’s the case.
I think the conflict is between unrestricted campaigning and citizens ability to cast a legitimate, well-informed, vote. What to do if these two things are in conflict? Those who’ve weighed in here are, it seems, reflexively saying ‘let’s curtail the vote to better enable the campaigning’ I come down on the other side: let’s curtail the campaign so as to enable the vote.
Clearly the problem in Montana, and one of the downsides to early voting, is that many votes were cast with less information than would have been available had everyone voted on election day. If you think the benefits of early voting, which I assume include more voter participation, outweigh the risks, fine.
I don’t understand how the timing of when campaigns begin and end impacts whether early voting is good policy.
If the campaign is over and done, before the vote, the voting isn’t ‘early.’ It’s just voting.
I don’t live in Montana. I don’t WANT to live in Montana.
America has had regions of ugly, brutal, and disgusting culture for my entire life. The tolerance and diversity of New England was one reason I moved here to Massachusetts in 1974.
I share your disgust with this episode. Worse, I agree with you that this behavior is spreading — encouraged and inflamed by generations of GOP racism, sexism, and inflammatory rhetoric.
It is no accident that the newly-elected representative who is the perpetrator of this crime has an “R” after his name — and it is no accident that the GOP seats him without hesitation.
With all due respect to those who criticize me for “blaming the voter”, episodes like this demonstrate why voters in Montana who put thugs like this in office NEED to be blamed — and shamed as well.
Shame on you, Mr. Gianforte, and shame on you, Montana voters, for electing Mr. Gianforte.
OK, so now what?
You’ve named and shamed voters. What happens next? Do they see the error of their ways? Or do they put another layer of insulation between themselves and you? And if it’s the latter, how does that help your interests?
Now THEY act like decent and responsible human beings. Or not. But they can not be allowed to hide behind the notion that this behavior is just another, essentially normal, part of politics.
Are you taking responsibility for their possible and/or potential response(s)? Are you asking Tom to take that responsibility?
I make no claim that my response helps my interests. I also make no personal effort to change their minds or behavior. The world is full of gangs and thugs. While I abhor such behavior, I lack both the ability and desire to change it.
I think that first step in any sort of reconciliation is for those who embrace this sort of brutality to recognize that they are wrong, to take steps to change their behavior, and to then and only then ask the rest of us to forgive their earlier deeds.
This is the formula pursued by Desmond Tutu in bringing peaceful resolution between the perpetrators of apartheid and their victims.
I think the most that I and we can to influence these voters is to remind them, as the consequences of their choices bear fruit, that they are reaping the harvest of the seeds they’ve sown.
I do think that the real test will come two years from now, when those who had already cast their votes when this incident took place have an opportunity to show that share the civilized values of the rest of us.
Hm … is there a way to help people change their minds, and even acknowledge that maybe they did something that wasn’t so smart, constructively? Is that even possible?
I don’t know, stomv. I don’t claim to have answers. But I’m not inclined to make excuses or rationalizations for people either. If one says that the tolerance for thuggery and irrationality is the result of “economic anxiety” or some such, you’re going to end up with the wrong answers, and you’ll still lose elections. If you take a more tragic view of humanity, acknowledging that racism, tribalism, spite, shame, and selfishness play roles in political identification … you may end up with uglier but more productive questions. A cynic tries to exploit those things. A realist simply acknowledges them.
As I say, culture itself and propaganda are extremely “sticky”. And we have to find a way to intervene, to *effectively* propagate values of social trust, compassion, and shared destiny — so that it burrows down to where media/money propaganda can’t uproot it. I don’t have the answers but we should start with the right questions.
People make mistakes. People deny reality. It’s not wrong to criticize voters. It’s not sufficient, but it’s not wrong.
I went into depth examining why Steve Bullock won his race a few months ago and it’s worth reexamining what he did that worked before writing off Montana as a lost cause. It’s fertile ground, it’ll just take a few more seasons before we can go to harvest.
Quist had an 8 point deficit in the last poll, and he lost by less than that on election day. He ran 20 points ahead of Hillary Clinton and 35 points ahead of the last Democratic house nominee who was a more seasoned campaigner and legislator. Gianforte is really weak going into 2018 and there are now grassroots Democratic groups in every Montana county thanks to this race. There are now college groups that weren’t there in 2016. This work takes time</strong>.
The conservative movement lost 46 states with Goldwater and won 49 with Reagan 20 years later. The progressive movement was expecting to win states that haven’t come around to us yet, and we are losing states we took for granted. So time to contest every race and learn from our defeats-including this one.
Depends, I guess, on what is meant by ‘constructive’…. I don’t, fr’instance, consider that we would lionize any of the great American heroes like Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, FDR and MLK Jr. (just a short list and not intended to be comprehensive…) if they didn’t demonstrate very clearly that it is possible to help people change their minds. Whether any of the aforementioned did so ‘constructively’ is a matter that might be under some dispute.
I think though, in this present pass, opportunities are few and far between and this because a lot of the people on the Right know with a certainty — which is the wellspring of a great deal of dissonance — that they are in the wrong… and so they don’t even listen to begin with. And the biggest, boldest, media manipulation that happens depends exactly on this dynamic: The very undiluted essence of the message from Fox News’/Brietbart/Alex Jones/etc to rank-and-file conservatives is “libruls are every last bit the lying manipulative rat-fucking screwup you secretly suspect yourself of being, so therefore you are entirely justified in refusing to listen to them.’ Yeah, it is screwed up. How to un-screw that, ‘constructively’? I dunno.
Ha. I think you’ve put your finger on it … that “denial” is not the same thing as “refutation”. In other words, a person in denial knows on some subconscious level that they’re not right. They just can’t admit it to themselves or out loud, because then they’d have to change, which is difficult and humiliating.
It’s a tough nut to crack!
I don’t see a reason NOT to seat Gianforte who was, like it or not, duly elected.