Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
What should be more important to Amanda Curtis’ campaign? Enforcing message discipline? Or, making her as interesting as possible?
Her campaign staff's answer is obvious: message discipline. Keep her on her talking points, deflect or flat out refuse to answer uncomfortable questions, post as little as possible on her website and Facebook page, and block trackers even if that makes her staff look like bullies and diverts them from signing-up volunteers.
That’s how conventional big campaigns are run. They’re advertising exercises, with the candidate serving as the soap or beer. Curtis’ public relations chief, Les Braswell, comes from that background. And of course, this is nothing new. Readers who are my contemporaries will remember Joel McGinniss’ classic about the 1968 Presidential campaign, The $elling of the President.
Curtis, however, has no time to run a conventional campaign. Early voting begins in a month. If she’s going to excite rank and file Democrats, generate enthusiasm among 18–29-year-old-voters, and by example lead young single women and mothers to the polls, she needs to run a guerilla campaign — a campaign that makes her as interesting as possible.
That wouldn’s be hard to do. She is interesting: a math teacher; a state legislator who doesn’t quaver in the presence of the king of Montana’ gunpowder caucus, Gary Marbut; a human rights advocate who wasn’t afraid to observe that Rep. Krayton Kerns said things that made decent people want to clock him in his chops. She’s somehow associated, probably through her 43-year-old husband, with the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union organized by some of the most color labor leaders ever to mount a soapbox or man a picket line. Why did her Facebook page once sport a photograph of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and later a leader of the communist party in the United States, who died in Moscow and was given a state funeral there?
These are some of the things that make Curtis fascinating — but they’re also the things her campaign, and Montana’s Democratic Party, evidently want to suppress. Former Democratic state senator Ken Toole, for example, wrote on his Facebook page:
Did MTPR reporter Edward O'Brian really ask Amanda Curtis about being a COMMUNIST!!?? Please! Just because the far right lives in the paranoid world of the 1950's doesn't mean reporters have to join them. I guess fighting for the middle class has become anti-American and subversive. I’m going to to make another contribution to Amanda’s campaign!
Memo to Toole: it was both a fair question and a necessary one.
My advice: make her as interesting as possible. Load her website with as information about her political views, her association with the Wobblies, why she likes Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and why in 2008 she wrote for the IWW’s Industrial Worker a report (PDF, page 6) on the restoration of Frank Little’s grave in Butte.
She was anointed John Walsh’s replacement because she was unconventional, a chili pepper of a politician who made Democrats feel good about being Democrats. It’s a mistake to stick her in the straitjacket of a conventional message discipline campaign. Make her interesting and turn her loose.