Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
In the eyes of Democratic politicians, that is. Before West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant agreed to run for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by retiring Democrat Jay Rockefeller, 10 WV Democrats refused the honor of running to succeed him, reports the New York Times, evidently citing WV’s rightward slide and bemoaning the lack of a guarantee they would win.
That rightward slide, greased by cultural issues and powered by the economics of coal, is real, and so are the consequences for Democrats who, despite holding a two-to-one advantage in voter registration, and winning WV’s last elections for governor and U.S. Senator, fear they’re hitched to a dark star — Barack Hussein Obama — that will pull them down to defeat.
So rather than subjecting themselves to the travails of campaigning, and the shame of losing in a good cause, and taking a chance they might win, 10 fair weather WV Democrats stayed on their porches, nodding wisely in sorrow as Ms. Tennant stepped into the rain they’re sure will wash her away after she’s first squashed by giant elephants. And if she wins, they’ll be the first to claim credit for her victory, a claim that will have in it a perverse element of truth.
WV’s Democratic midgets have kin in other states. In Montana, for example, some Flathead Democrats are sure that Frank Garner, the erstwhile Kalispell police chief now running for the Republican nomination for Montana House District 7 (old downtown Kalispell), is at least nine feet tall and growing. They see Garner not as an untested candidate for a dangerously reactionary political party, but as a political Goliath, and see themselves not as Davids but as dwarfs Garner’s Brogans will stomp into huckleberry jam. And so, to the best of my knowledge, no Democrat is yet willing to run in HD-7, although one might still step forward if he can stop trembling long enough to move his Nike clad feet.
But Frank Garner is not nine feet tall, not in any sense. Objectively, he’s a handsome, well known, and generally well regarded, former policeman who’s chosen to run as a Republican in an urban district in which close elections are the rule. He’s never before sought political office, so he has to learn how to campaign, just like every other virgin office seeker. His virtues that impress Democrats may well depress Republicans, who may see him as a man who wants to get things done rather than carry the Tea Party’s bucket of bile, and therefore may challenge him in the primary as a Republican In Name Only (RINO) who must be defeated in the name of ideological purity. That could force him so far to the right that he’s left clinging to the edge of the Earth with his left hand.
What Democrats — who increasingly despise partisan politics and the conflict inherent therein — must recognize is that in partisan elections — which I believe are good things — the contest is never just between the personal qualities and positions of the candidates. In fact, personal qualities are not even the most important factors. Partisan elections are first and foremost contests between the people and philosophies that political parties represent. Voters can and will conclude that Frank Garner is a fine man, a smart man, a man with a legislator’s temperament, but also a man allied with the Republican Party, the party that opposes expanding Medicaid in Montana, that wants to reduce taxes on the rich, that wants to cut social services for the less fortunate, that wants to enforce reproductive ignorance in public school (and in some cases, wants to eliminate public schools), and that therefore Frank Garner should not be elected to represent HD-7 in Helena.
Just as Republicans are 10 feet tall in West Virginia only in the eyes of Democrats who forgot their morning dose of spine stiffener, erstwhile police chiefs in Montana are nine feet tall only in the eyes of Democrats who see legislative elections as contests between individuals instead of political parties; equally spineless Democrats who fear they don’t measure up against a political tyro whose nascent political career should be arrested.