No shirt, no shoes, no sweat! You can still vote, though so few of us do.
I said two weeks ago that there was always something on an election ballot that made me feel good about voting.
This year, there were two things in particular: voting against the legislative referendum that would have ended Election Day voter registration and voting for state Supreme Court Justice Mike Wheat.
As we all know by now, the voter-restriction measure, referred to the ballot by the Republican Legislature, went down in flames by a margin of 57 to 43 percent. Wheat did even better, beating Lawrence VanDyke by a margin of 59 to 41 percent.
Ed Kemmick
People have been rightly critical of the Democratic Party for its ham-handed selection of a successor to Max Baucus, who left the Senate seat he’d been warming for decades to become the new U.S. ambassador to China. That successor, then-Lt. Gov. John Walsh, had to pull out of the Senate race when it was discovered that he’d plagiarized his senior thesis at the Army War College.
But why do we hear no criticism of the Republicans for having chosen VanDyke to run for the Montana Supreme Court? Oh, I’m sorry, that is a nonpartisan position, so of course the Republicans had no hand in his selection.
It was surely just a series of fortuitous circumstances that resulted in this relatively inexperienced lawyer being brought up from Texas to be solicitor general for Republican Tim Fox, the state attorney general, then running for the justice position less than two years later.
And surely the out-of-state, dark-money right-wingers who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking Mike Wheat did so because VanDyke, as he proclaimed ceaselessly, was devoted to “the law, not politics.” And yet you’d think the people who bankrolled those ads, who must have had some financial savvy, would have groomed a better candidate.
It is their money, though, so God bless them. At least they know now that Montanans aren’t that stupid.
In the other Supreme Court race this year, Justice Jim Rice won 78.5 percent of the vote in his race against W. David Herbert, a Libertarian who appeared to be interested in only one thing, jury nullification.
I’m so old that I remember a Montana governor candidate who was also a Libertarian in favor of jury nullification. But Larry Dodge was a Libertarian when a lot of people on the left still felt comfortable under that banner.
As for LR 126, the referendum that would have restricted voting rights, it was pitched as a means of preventing voter fraud, but if anyone ever came up with a single instance of fraud resulting from Election Day registration, I never saw it. You’d hope that conservatives, of all people, would be opposed to passing laws to deal with a nonexistent problem.
The most depressing thing about the recent election was the voter turnout numbers. Just 36.6 percent of the voting-eligible population went to the polls nationwide, the worst numbers since 1942, a year when millions of voters were off defending freedom. Montana did a lot better than that—54.6 percent—but we’re still a small-population state where it’s easier to feel involved.
Even our numbers are nothing to brag about. There are no doubt many factors at work, but the avalanche of dark-money-funded attack ads must play a large role in convincing people that politics is a sham, and that not voting is a way to register disgust with the whole sordid business.
Speaking of money, I can’t let the election of 2014 pass without noting that George Will, in a column that ran in the Billings Gazette the day before the election, scoffed at the notion that $1 billion spent this year on races for governors, senators and representatives was anything more than a drop in the bucket.
“Considering the enormous consequences the political class has as it sloshes trillions of dollars hither and yon,” he continued, “it is strange that in selecting the 2015 members of this class Americans spent less than half the $2.2 billion they spent last month on Halloween candy.”
Four years ago, Will made a similarly ridiculous comparison, noting that Americans spend more on yogurt every year than we do on elections. In previous election cycles, he mentioned that we also spend more on dog food. To compare the regular purchase of food items by tens or hundreds of millions of people with the concentrated attempt to influence politics by a relative handful of people is beyond absurd.
One such comparison would suggest that George Will is slipping. To make similar comparisons year after year suggests outright dementia, or, what is worse, a cynical appraisal of his audience’s intelligence. In two years, I predict, he will make a pointless comparison with spending on gluten-free cookies.
