Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
U.S. Senate candidates, Steve Daines and Amanda Curtis, on the stage Monday night at MSUB’s Petro Hall.
Amanda Curtis does not think the United States can be “the policeman of the world.” Nor does she believe that Congress should “kick the can down the road.”
Steve Daines said his policies are good “not only for this generation but our children and our grandchildren.” He also said “we need to have both sides coming to the table and coming to an agreement.”
Curtis said, four or five times, that Daines is “the most extreme congressman that our state has ever had” and that she wants policies that will help the middle class, “not just the biggest corporations and the wealthiest individuals.”
Daines boasted of his “A+” rating from the National Rifle Association, which he contrasted with Curtis’s “F” rating. Also, if you were wondering, Daines said he “will stand with the people of Montana. I will not stand with President Obama.”
And so it went for about 55 minutes, as the two candidates for the open Senate seat from Montana met for their only televised debate of the campaign.
Daines is a Republican, a one-term member of the U.S. House from Montana, and Curtis is a Democrat, a one-term member of the Montana House of Representatives.
I am your Last Best News correspondent and a person who has never cared much for politics, mostly because in this country in this age it seems like a bad spectator sport.
I went to the debate at Petro Hall on the Montana State University Billings campus to see how the candidates comported themselves, how genuine their answers seemed, how they struck someone embarrassingly clueless about what the pundits call “pressing issues.”
From that perspective, I would have to say that Curtis “won” the debate, if only because she was much more personal and aggressive, calling Daines on numerous contradictions and questionable recitations of “facts.”
But this was hardly a surprise. Curtis is a late starter, having been selected to challenge Daines only because John Walsh, appointed to the Senate less than a year ago, dropped his candidacy after he was shown to have plagiarized his senior paper at the U.S. Army War College.
But it was most likely too little too late. All Daines had to do was grimace or smile tensely, as he did often Monday night, wait for Curtis to finish and then fire another broadside at President Obama.
This prompted Curtis to deliver her best line of the night, when she said, “I am so thankful that President Obama is not on the ballot in Montana.”
It was a good line, but it didn’t stop Daines from invoking the specter of Obama half a dozen more times, and of Nancy Pelosi once. How he failed to mention Harry Reid is beyond me.
Curtis said many times that she was “one of us,” a regular Montanan, but when I thought of regular Montanans during the debate, it was to wonder how many people watching the spectacle were as helplessly adrift on a sea of purported facts as I was.
Daines said that if the Keystone pipeline were built—if only that obstructionist in the White House would allow it to be built—it would be a great horn of plenty, dispensing ripe fruit and crisp greenbacks. But he also said there is a law in place that would make it illegal to send any crude oil flowing through it to foreign refineries.
Is this true? Is it true only of crude oil produced in the United States, and not of the crude oil flowing down from the tar sands of Canada, for which the Keystone is designed? I don’t know and I’m betting the vast majority of viewers don’t know. This question may be answered by various media outlets in their fact-checking follow-ups, but how many people will take the trouble to read, or listen in?
I mention that statement because it was the one that really stopped me in my tracks. But there were many others from both candidates that left me scratching my head. I would just begin wondering about one statement when it was time to stop worrying about that and listen to the latest doubtful claim.
The fundamental flaw in these debates is the one-hour format. That seems fairly lengthy, but it really only gives enough time for a series of sound bites. I would like to see a format that requires, for three or four important questions anyway, answers of at least 10 minutes, with no repetition allowed, no straying off into vaguely related set speeches.
It won’t happen, of course. The debates as we know them just get worse every election cycle, and the longer a person has been in office the more smoothly flow the unctuous reassurances, the clichés of the type I recounted in the first few paragraphs of this story.
The media are partly to blame. They organize and host these things, and when a candidate appears unwilling to debate, as Ryan Zinke did in the House race, we are treated to high-minded editorials extolling the virtues of open debate and public dialogue.
But the debates are mostly a prestige affair for the sponsoring media, a circus-like spectacle that takes a lot of time and effort to pull off—time and effort that could probably be better employed digging into what the candidates say, what they have actually done and where their money comes from.
We all want to believe we are responsible citizens, so we watch these debates and scratch our chins … and then vote precisely as we knew we would vote many long months ago, based on whether the candidate had an “R” or a “D” after his or her name.
Except for those fabled “undecided voters,” whom all the candidates are supposed to be wooing.
Who those undecided voters are, I certainly don’t know, but I hope they learned more than I did Monday night.
