Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
In early April, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and two equally progressive colleagues blocked Sen. John Walsh’s bill to protect the North Fork of the Flathead. A close to identical bill by Rep. Steve Daines (R-MT) had passed the House a month earlier.
One might suppose Daines did not appreciate the Toomey Trio’s maneuver. If so, forgiveness came quickly. Near the end of June, Steve Daines held a fundraiser with Toomey in Washington, D.C. The mother’s milk of politics heals many wounds.
Money, reports a friend who did some digging, probably wasn’t the only thing Daines got from Toomey. He also adopted Toomey’s campaign slogan from 2010. Here’s the rest of what he unearthed:
Here is a nugget about Daines I uncovered just last week, but forgot to send along. Walsh’s recent press release about Daines/Toomey reminded me, so I’m sending it to you.
First, some context. I was wondering about Daines’ slogan: “More jobs. Less government.” Catchy and effective. Daines didn’t dream that up, I thought; he had to have gotten it from somewhere. I thought maybe it was a widely used, generic slogan for generic Republican candidates.
I thought to check Google, so I searched “more jobs less government.” Too many Daines hits, so I restricted the search to 2009 and earlier because Daines first Senate campaign began on November 13, 2010 and that day a Montana blog noted Daines’ use of the slogan. Bingo. The second result was to the Montour County (Pennsylvania) Republican Committee’s press releases, which included the following: Kristie Cole spoke about Pat Toomey’s race for US Senate with a simple but powerful theme of “More jobs, Less Government”. Interestingly, although Google lists the page date as September 14, 2008, the page itself lists the date as September 12, 2010. Nonetheless, the slogan was used by Toomey at least several months before Daines entered the 2010 race.
Looking for earlier uses of the slogan by Toomey, I added Toomey to the Google search and restricted the search to 2010 and earlier. With that search, the earliest reference to Toomey’s use of the slogan is a blog dated May 12, 2010. Another reference is in a different post from August 9, 2010. Yet another reference in the results has a page dated August 10, 2010, containing a Toomey video ad with the slogan. We know the ad came out no later than August 10, but unfortunately Vimeo (the video host) doesn’t list the upload date. However, sorting the Toomey videos by date there was an earlier video (date unknown) titled More Jobs, Less Government Tour of PA that doesn’t seem to include the slogan in the video.
Finally, to try and find the earliest use of the slogan, I searched “more jobs less government” restricted to 2009 and earlier and excluding Toomey and Daines. There weren’t many hits. The earliest was a December 23, 2005, page about a Paul Krugman article that contained a comment from “Dirk Schulbach” that included the following: “More jobs = less government assistance needed.” Mr. Schulbach claims that the thoughts in his comments are his “own work,” which may be true given that they contain the earliest Google result for the [slightly different] slogan. I wonder what Mr. Schulbach thinks of the use of his slogan; based on his comments, I believe he would agree with the political slogan. One could probably ask him; there is only one “Dirk Schulbach” in the United States, in Portland, Oregon.
Tying together this quick Google research, Dirk Schulbach in Portland, Oregon, coined the phrase “More jobs = less government assistance needed” in December 2005. Pat Toomey changed the phrase from a quasi-tautology to a political statement in mid-2010 for use in his US Senate campaign. Steve Daines borrowed the slogan in late-2010 and used it to win a US House seat. In the US House, Daines proposed governmental protection for the North Fork of the Flathead River. That protection was blocked by US Senator Pat Toomey, together with Senators Cruz and Coburn. The protection was blocked to encourage smaller government or, as Coburn phrased it, to “transfer the land to Montana and reduce the state’s share of federal ‘payments in lieu of taxes’ that go to local governments.” The “less government” mantra not only boomeranged back on Daines, it also demonstrated that “less government” negatively impacted Montana communities and, thus, jobs.
Thus one learns both the origin of a political slogan and the harmful application of that slogan in the real world, in your neighborhood. There should be at least as much concern about Daines taking Toomey’s ideas as there is about Daines taking Toomey’s money.