Newly inaugurated Democrat Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer had
a meeting with Republican legislative leaders in Helena recently,
ostensibly to discuss some of his top priorities for the current
session, including tax breaks designed to attract movie productions
to Montana, promotion of ethanol production, and a bill to
strengthen the state’s stream access law. According to
participants, the meeting turned into a “25-minute filibuster,”
where Schweitzer supposedly refused to let the half dozen GOP
lawmakers present speak at all.
“We went down there for 25 minutes and listened to him rant and
have a 10-year-old temper tantrum,” Senate Minority Leader Bob
Keenan told the Helena Independent-Record. “To me, it’s
sad, I wonder if he wants to be governor. This is an inconvenience
for him and he’s finding it’s a very difficult job.”
“They’re all big boys and girls,” the governor was quoted as
saying later. “They got here because they’re able to pick up a ball
and run with it.”
This incident was typical of Brian Schweitzer’s first few weeks
in Montana’s governor’s office.
SCHWEITZER, 49, FORMER WHITEFISH, Montana, rancher and businessman,
and married father of three, has not previously held elective
office. He won Montana’s 2004 gubernatorial race by beating
Billings Senate Republican Bob Brown 50% to 46%, after a
respectable attempt (51% to 47%) to unseat Conrad Burns in the 2000
U.S. Senate contest.
This time around Schweitzer was viewed — especially on liberal
Montana editorial pages — as the Treasure State’s Great Democratic
Hope after the four-year tenure of Republican Judy Martz. Martz was
the popular former governor Marc Racicot’s lieutenant governor, but
her own administration was so inept — for many
reasons — that her polling numbers told her not to seek
reelection, especially against the up-and-coming Schweitzer. During
his own campaign against Brown, Schweitzer played the role of the
anti-Martz. And for his own lieutenant governor running mate, he
craftily chose veteran Montana Senate Republican John Bohlinger of
Billings, as a way to reach out to Republicans and swing
voters.
Schweitzer beat Brown and brought some new Democrats to Helena
on his coattails, adding seats in the Montana House, and actually
gaining a slim majority in the Senate. On Election Day some
green-inspired environmental initiatives also passed, along with a
medical marijuana initiative. Still, an anti-gay marriage
referendum passed along with a dozen others across the country.
Montana’s demographics — like those of most neighboring states
— have changed radically in the last decade. The scenic mountain
counties in the western third of the state have seen an influx of
what the locals sarcastically call “Californicators,” a population
surge of semi-retired Baby Boomers, recreation-minded Gen Xers, and
entrepreneurial “modem cowboys,” all pushing the political compass
to the Left. Schweitzer carried the fast-growing college and ski
towns of this region such as Bozeman, Missoula, and Kalispell, not
to mention Butte, a Democratic stronghold thanks to its blue
collar, mining-union history. Brown carried most of the
agricultural prairie counties of the eastern two thirds of Montana,
where — as across much of the adjacent Great Plains — towns are
graying and shrinking in population, as young people move away,
schools and businesses close, and farmers go bust, leaving
windblown towns full of very old retirees who have lived there
their entire lives, and aren’t particularly wealthy.
That Schweitzer along with other Democratic candidates and some
liberal ballot measures prevailed is interesting in that George W.
Bush easily carried Montana, beating John Kerry 59% to 38%.
Incidentally, Bush also carried Colorado, which sent Democrat Ken
Salazar to the U.S. Senate. Go figure. All this seems to illustrate
that the fabled Red-Blue divide in modern America is really a
myth.
THE “MOUNTAIN” AMERICAN WEST is the nation’s fastest growing
region, and seems to be developing an odd political dynamic. While
its cities (Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Phoenix, Reno, et al.)
are good examples of booming, entrepreneurial prosperity (read:
Republican); Green-liberal Democrats are getting elected locally in
reaction to the Bush administration’s environmental policies
pertaining to the Western public lands, such as oil and gas
production. Schweitzer is an example of this type of Democrat. At
the same time the President, with his War-on-Terror and culture war
credentials, carried both aforementioned states without breaking a
sweat.
The paradoxes are everywhere. Even in my home state of Wyoming
(maybe the most Republican state in the Milky Way Galaxy), which
gave the President and native son Dick Cheney 67% of its vote, with
its entire three-person congressional delegation in the GOP column,
the state legislature and county offices lopsidedly Republican, and
with a state Democratic Party that occasionally convenes in high
school gyms or over coffee in luncheonettes: Wyoming still has a
Democrat — the popular David
Freudenthal — sitting in the governor’s office since 2003
(though it would be laughable to call Governor Freudenthal a
“liberal” — he’s a typical Wyoming NRA-Democrat). Back to
Schweitzer.
As noted, Governor Schweitzer has already locked horns with GOP
lawmakers on a number of issues. The first was his cancellation by
executive order — within days of his inauguration — of an already
approved and scheduled bison hunt on land adjacent to Yellowstone
National Park.
The hunt — the first since 1991 — was designed to cull a tiny
percentage of Yellowstone’s roughly 4,200 bison, some of those that
migrate out of the Park and onto federal public grazing lands in
Montana each winter. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP)
personnel routinely shoot out-of-bounds bison in that same area
anyway. This because up to 50% of Yellowstone bison are infected
with brucellosis, a disease that when transmitted to domestic
cattle causes cows to abort fetuses. By canceling the hunt,
Schweitzer drew criticism from hunting groups and ranchers that he
had caved in to pressure from out-of-state animal rights activists
and a Montana organization called “The Buffalo Field Campaign,” a
radical enviro group known for civil disobedience, including
on-site clashes with FWP personnel. All this after Schweitzer ran
campaign ads last fall portraying himself as one of those
NRA-supporting-hunter-sportsman Democrats (which his life story
indeed confirms).
Schweitzer further inflamed the issue by proposing the ludicrous
idea that all of those 4,200 bison in Yellowstone be rounded up and
tested for brucellosis. In the governor’s plan all infected animals
would be slaughtered, and the meat — which is safe to eat — would
be donated to worthy charities; the healthy bison would be
vaccinated, thus restocking Yellowstone with disease-free bison.
“I’m the first cattleman to be governor of Montana in generations,”
Schweitzer boldly told the Los Angeles Times. “I
understand disease and cattle. I’ll put the pieces together.”
Governor Schweitzer wasn’t clear as to who exactly was going to
pay for this massive undertaking of man and beast, almost biblical
in its scope. The U.S. Department of the Interior, whose purview is
the national parks, diplomatically informed the governor of the
unfeasibility of rounding up every bison on the over 2 million
acres of Yellowstone. Schweitzer had even gone so far as to try to
enlist the support of Governor Freudenthal in this harebrained
scheme as it pertained to Wyoming’s own shared borders with
Yellowstone. The good-natured Freudenthal quipped to Wyoming media
that Schweitzer “hadn’t been in office long before he decided to
help me run Wyoming.”
DESPITE HIS ROOKIE STATUS, Governor Schweitzer has also not been
shy in his criticism of current domestic Bush policies. While
recently attending a National Governor Association meeting in
Washington, D.C., Schweitzer employed the sort of barnyard rhetoric
that the President would have certainly understood when he also
told the L.A. Times that Bush’s projected Social Security
reforms were “a bull market hawking lousy studs.” Around that time
Schweitzer also delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to a Bush
Saturday morning radio address, where he questioned — among other
things — administration policies concerning our neighbor to the
north, i.e. Canadian beef imports and cheap prescription drugs:
“Why allow bad beef to enter the U.S. from Canada and not allow
safe medicine.” Not bad for a guy just a few weeks off the
ranch.
The Montana governor’s latest bit of public grandstanding
concerns the letter he has lately sent to the Pentagon, in which he
demands that Montana National Guard troops —and equipment —
currently serving in Iraq be excused from that duty and sent home
in anticipation of Montana’s annual summer forest fire season,
which is expected to be severe this year due to ongoing drought in
the Northern Rockies. I’m not aware of Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld’s response to this letter, but the subject did get
Schweitzer some zingers from Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, which
the governor probably found gratifying.
Montanans seem to have elected to the governor’s office the
Treasure State’s version of Howard Dean. Not Dean the governor, but
Dean the presidential candidate and DNC chairman. In some respects
there is a refreshing prairie populism to even Schweitzer’s most
bizarre rhetoric and schemes. Brian Schweitzer-watching has
certainly become endemic in this part of the world. But Montana’s
GOP political establishment, media, and ordinary citizenry seem to
be eagerly — and perversely — awaiting the governor’s next (so
far only figurative) Deanesque scream. They rub their palms
together in anticipation of the real thing.
It’s going to be a fun next four years around here.
