A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Bengquisition gives Clinton 11 hours of free publicity. Hillary Clinton kept her cool. Rep. Trey Gowdy and his fellow Republican witch hunters did not. The result? The hunted ate the lunch of the hunters. It speaks ill of the Republican Party that its members in the U.S. House of Representatives ever thought the American deaths at Benghazi were anything but the cost of doing business in a dangerous world. And it’s downright shameful that Gowdy, et al, tried to exploit that tragedy for partisan gain. There’s poetic justice in their witch hunt’s making Clinton look Presidential.
Head of public instruction Denise Juneau for Congress? That’s a possibility, reports Pete Talbot at Intelligent Discontent. She sent up a trial balloon yesterday — a balloon that I missed, so thanks to Pete for his blog post.
Juneau would make a fine U.S. Representative. Whether she would make a fine candidate is another matter. Four years ago, she beat Sandy Welch (a better candidate than Democrats like to admit) by considerably less than a landslide. If reports that she’s not an effective fundraiser are true, that’s a huge problem. Beating Ryan Zinke will require at least $4–5 million. And she would be starting late, almost a year late; probably too late.
Re-electing Gov. Steve Bullock is the top 2016 priority for Montana’s Democrats. Capturing Montana’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is a low Democratic priority, and except for the 2000 election, when Nancy Keenan mounted a credible campaign for an open seat, has been since Pat Williams retired in 1997.
A good, well funded, Democratic candidate has a reasonable chance of winning the seat in Presidential years, but probably can’t hold it in midterm elections. Therefore, Democrats want a Congressional candidate who will neither embarrass their party nor suck up money that could fund other campaigns.
If Juneau does run for the U.S. House, I hope she runs as a true blue Democrat, as an economic reformer of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren genre, not as a socially moderate deficit hawk pandering to so-called moderate Republicans.