The key to understanding Dennis McDonald’s no-holds-barred attempt to characterize Rep. Dennis Rehberg as a drunk who is morally unfit to hold public office may lie in the election returns from the 2006 senate contest in Montana.
In that election, Democrat Jon Tester won his seat by a whisker-thin 4.1 votes per precinct plurality. Together, incumbent Republican Conrad Burns and Stan Jones, received 206,660 votes to Tester’s 199,845. If Tester faces just one challenger in 2012, he could be in trouble even with the advantages of incumbency. Politically, he’s working with next to no margin for error.
Those numbers are on the minds of every Democrat in Montana, as is the knowledge that the Democratic Party spent almost two years hammering Burns for his relationship to Jack Abramoff. One conclusion is that accusing Burns of scandalous, and potentially illegal, behavior drove up his negatives to the point where he was vulnerable. Those who draw that conclusion may today believe that defeating Rehberg requires blackening his reputation with a personal scandal, which could explain the efforts of McDonald and others to portray Rehberg as a bar brawling drunk who lacks the character to represent Montana.
I don’t share that conclusion. Being linked to Abramoff certainly hurt Burns, but that was not the only reason he lost. He was 71 in 2006, clearly slowed by age. He fell asleep at public meetings. In Polson, he inexplicably interrupted his speech to take a cell phone call from his gardner, a moment, captured on videotape, as sad as it was hilarious. He wasn’t yet a doddering old fool, but he was obviously losing his mojo. Thoughtful voters, many Republicans among them, could imagine him in the last years of his term — and cringed at the image. Some of these Republicans voted for Tester, while others either didn’t cast a vote in that race or cast their vote for Jones. My personal opinion is that Burns, never the brightest bulb in the senate, was hurt as much by the perception that his lights were dimming as by the charges that he was too close to Abramoff.
That’s not the case with Rehberg. He might be tipsy from time-to-time, but he still has his mojo, and still knows how to bring federal dollars to Montana (which is generally what matters most to the power elite). A personal scandal on the order of taking indecent liberties with choir boys while a priest watched and sweated could bring him down, but accusations of being a two-fisted, hard drinking, good ol’ boy won’t.