{"id":22896,"date":"2018-06-13T00:03:56","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T06:03:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=22896"},"modified":"2018-06-13T00:03:56","modified_gmt":"2018-06-13T06:03:56","slug":"campaign-shifts-to-lower-gear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/06\/campaign-shifts-to-lower-gear\/","title":{"rendered":"Campaign shifts to lower gear"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A new ad for Matt Rosendale attacks U.S. Sen. Jon Tester for supporting sanctuary cities.<\/p><\/div>\n

Over coffee after last week\u2019s primary, we were debating how long it would take for the U.S. Senate race between state Auditor Matt Rosendale and incumbent Jon Tester to turn negative. The answer: It already had.<\/p>\n

The day before the primary, Sen. Tester was still sending out news releases touting the bills he had sent to President Trump\u2019s desk. The next day, as soon as Rosendale had been declared the Republican primary winner, Tester\u2019s campaign sent out a release that contained this sentence: \u201cMatt Rosendale is an East Coast developer who looks out for himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statement from the Montana Democratic Party began with the phrase \u201cWealthy East Coast developer Matt Rosendale \u2026 .\u201d Get used to that phrase. As innocuous and insipid as it may seem, that appears to be the standard phrase we will be hearing about Rosendale from now until November.<\/p>\n

\"DC\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

To be fair, Tester scored some points. His campaign pointed out that Rosendale got two \u201cPants on Fire\u201d<\/a> ratings from Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site. One was for the bizarre claim that Tester favors national gun registration that would require Montanans to get permission from the government to buy a gun. The other was for claiming that Tester got a raise in the last omnibus budget bill; in fact, congressional pay has been frozen since 2009.<\/p>\n

Some of Tester\u2019s attacks had a looser shot pattern. In one release, Tester called Rosendale \u201can East Coast developer propped up by out-of-state billionaires with a history of launching false attack campaigns against elected officials with character, like Jon Tester.\u201d Another said, \u201cA lot of politicians can count on millionaires and billionaires to spend obscene amounts of money to help them win an election — just ask our opponent. All they have to do is trade their votes and sell their souls.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his own ads and statements, soulless Rosendale has criticized Tester for \u201cshipping billions of dollars to the Iranian regime,\u201d for supporting \u201cdangerous sanctuary cities\u201d and for voting \u201cagainst tax cuts for Montanans while voting for trillions in more debt and taxpayer bonuses for [his] office.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is both truth and flim-flam in each of those statements, which is what makes election season so frustrating. Probably 80 percent of Montanans already know how they will vote in congressional races this fall. The millions of dollars<\/a> that will be pumped into these races, many of them from people who don\u2019t care a whit about Montana, are all going toward persuading the unpersuaded 20 percent, many of whom are months away from even thinking about the races \u2013 if they ever do.<\/p>\n

The rest of us have to sit through months of half-true or false claims when all we really want off TV are the baseball scores. Yet somehow it seems important to sort through at least some of the claims, even if only to provide some perspective.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>For example, U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., sent out an email last week touting \u201cgood news\u201d about the U.S. economy and noting, among other things, that the economy added 223,000 jobs in May. The number is accurate, according to government figures, and it is by all accounts a good number.<\/p>\n

But the economy added that many jobs or more in at least 33 months<\/a> of the Obama administration. I can\u2019t recall even once that Gianforte or any other Republican ever referred to job growth under Obama as \u201cgood news.\u201d In fact, then-candidate Trump repeatedly referred to Obama\u2019s job numbers as \u201cphony,\u201d \u201cfake\u201d and \u201ctotally fiction.\u201d He was either lying then or now; I can\u2019t think of a third option.<\/p>\n

Sometimes slippery numbers slip onto Last Best News. In a comment last week, Dick Britzman<\/a> said that \u201charboring illegal immigrants\u201d was costing the United States $113 billion a year, citing an outdated study<\/a> by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.<\/p>\n

Alarm bells went off in my head because (1.) these are really hard figures to compute, (2.) it seemed like a really big number and (3.) FAIR is a well-known advocacy group favoring strong restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration. That doesn\u2019t make its numbers wrong, but it does mean they require extra scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, it didn\u2019t take long to find sharply different estimates, not only from the usual suspects like Politifact<\/a> but also from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation<\/a> and the Cato Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This wouldn\u2019t matter if we were just wrangling over an ultimately unknowable number, but these figures can have policy implications. In a follow-up comment, Britzman said that ridding the country of illegals would free up billions of dollars to be used for our own citizens.<\/p>\n

He wrote that unlike liberals, Republicans \u201crealize that money doesn\u2019t grow on trees.\u201d Here we go again. I have known a fair number of liberals and have never met one yet who thought money grew on trees.<\/p>\n

If anything, it\u2019s Republicans who have abandoned their traditional fiscal conservatism for such pretty misconceptions as \u201ctax cuts always pay for themselves\u201d and \u201cif we keep refusing to pay for government, we can eventually drown it in a bathtub.\u201d<\/p>\n

Want to see the evidence? Or, with hundreds of negative ads to go before the first snowfall, does it really even matter?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over coffee after last week\u2019s primary, we were debating how long it would take for the U.S. Senate race between state Auditor Matt Rosendale and incumbent Jon Tester to turn negative. The answer: It already had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":22897,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[335,3084,553],"class_list":["post-22896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-greg-gianforte","tag-jon-tester","tag-matt-rosendale","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22896"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22901,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22896\/revisions\/22901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}