Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.

 

3 January 2014

John Walsh The Anointed & John Walsh The Evasive

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Lt. Gov. John Walsh is the Democratic Party Establishment’s choice for the nomination for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Sen. Max Baucus. Gov. Steve Bullock has endorsed Walsh, and so have Sens. Baucus and Jon Tester. Walsh is holding fundraisers across Montana, and in places like Washington, D.C., where the fattest cats are found. In person, I’m told, he’s impressing donors.

In public, however, he’s holding out on voters by not spelling out his positions on the issues. Several times a week his campaign emails statements taking to task Rep. Steve Daines, the putative Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, for sins against the commonweal (there’s a lot to work with here, so Walsh is being selective), but three months after declaring his candidacy, Walsh refuses to add a detailed issues page to his campaign’s website.

After I wrote about this last month, a party insider asked Walsh, very politely, why he was so slow in fleshing out his website. He replied there had been problems, that a staffer involuntarily left the campaign, and that things would improve. He didn’t say when.

I suspect I know when: never, if he thinks he can get away with it. Otherwise, when he files for office with Montana’s Secretary of State. And perhaps even later than that. This isn’t the result of an employee who wasn’t getting the job done. Websites are easily designed, and there are plenty of off-the-shelf solutions that generate high quality websites in a couple of hours. No, this is the result of a deliberate decision not to tell the voters where he stands on issues lest someone disagree with him.

To be perfectly clear: Walsh is evading his responsibility to tell Montanans where he stands on the issue. And he’s beginning to lose my support.

Update — who was the leaker?

Over at 4and20blackbirds, Lizard raises the possibility that Walsh himself leaked the inspector general’s report to deal with the issue now rather than deal with it later, at a more inconvenient time. Read Lizard’s post and decide for yourself. He makes a plausible argument. All I can say at this point is, that better not be what happened.