Free Republic

Ping for those who haven’t seen the photo of Karl Ohs on horseback — from back in the day.

There is only this one photo of Ohs from the famous Freemen standoff left on Google images. One hopes that more will pop up in his honor.

On Montana Headlines, there is an excerpt from a longer Charles Johnson piece about last summer's GOP state convention in which Johnson talks about Ohs saying farewell to the party he served so well. It is short, lyrical, and worth reading.

Johnson's full obituary on Ohs is also good.

Corey Stapleton, outgoing state Senate minority leader, recently said that Karl Ohs was the uncredited and unsung hero behind the many legislative and economic successes of the Judy Martz administration.

One thing that is becoming clear (and that one is hearing more and more in Montana Republican circles) is that while Martz wasn't a skilled politician who could keep out of electoral and press problems, she was a better governor either than her popular Republican predecessor or her popular Democratic successor.

And "the rock" (as Stapleton put it) behind her was the old cowboy, Karl Ohs.

He will be missed. Deeply.

As I noted above, your response was precisely how most Republicans we’ve talked to saw the letter.

Again, a reason for posting this was out of curiosity to see how people outside Montana would see the letter and to see if anything similar has been encountered elsewhere around the country.

In general, your point is a good one.

But in this particular upcoming governor’s race, the choice in Montana is a pretty clear one between Roy Brown and Brian Schweitzer.

And in general, choices in Montana tend to be pretty clear, but not always.

Bob Brown in the last election was too moderate to be a stark difference from Schweitzer (and the latter used a lot of conservative rhetoric.)

Likewise, in the 2006 Senate race, Conrad Burns talked about all of the federal spending he brought to Montana — not a good way to endear fiscal conservatives to your cause.

But these are the exception in Montana.

This mailer may get enough checks in response to cover the cost of sending it, but the point was to provoke a reaction from Republicans, not actually to get Republicans to cross over.

You make a good point that a letter like this has a different flavor coming from someone who is an incumbent and who is at the moment at the reins of government — as opposed to a gubernatorial hopeful.

The main point to the letter, still, is probably to get an over-reaction from Republicans.

I posted this on FR at the risk of being part of an over-reaction. It is just such an unusual political maneuver that I thought it might be of interest outside of Montana.

Another reason I posted it was to see if anyone around the country has encountered similar tactics, by either party.

Feel free to ping this thread around to see what kind of reaction it gets.

Believe me, no-one is overlooking it on the GOP side. Seeing it as intimidating is the most common response to the letter that we have encountered.

The problem is that the letter was written so very nicely, without a single bad word about Roy Brown or any other Republican.

So if anyone makes a public stink about it, the Democrats point to this sweet letter and ask, “what was wrong with it? We were nicely reaching out to Republicans.”

And to independents who aren’t terribly engaged with politics (about a third of the MT electorate,) probably there would seem to be nothing wrong with it.

It was very skilfully done. The governor is an incredibly good politician.

As pointed out in the comments section of the blog, if W had sent a similar letter to big Al Gore supporters in the run-up to the 2004 election, one suspects that many Dems would have seen it has overtly intimidating.

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Further commentary at Montana Headlines.

Not sure if this is something that is done commonly elsewhere around the country, but it was a first for Montana to have a candidate send a fundraising letter to supporters of his opponents, citing exactly what they had donated to Republican candidates in the last election cycle.

As we note in the Montana Headlines commentary, every Republican we know of who got one of these letters was ticked off about it.

And also, as we note in the MH commentary, the specific content of the reactions have been a sort of Rorschach test of how individual Republicans feel about the governor.

The governor was almost certainly doing this to provoke a reaction -- he certainly got one. The question is whether it will be to his long-term benefit or detriment.

I don’t know any stats, but they are certainly much more common today than even 10 years ago. People are just out in the mountain lion habitat in far greater numbers today — both to live and to play.

All very true. We’ve got us a good one.

Brown got beat all around the state. The libertarian candidate for governor who was in at least one of the debates loved to say that there were two tax-and-spend liberals on the stage with him. And there was more truth to that than anyone cared to think about.

I think a lot of Republicans stayed home, knowing that Bush would win Montana and that Rehberg would crush Lindeen in the Congressional race. This unquestionably hurt us in state legislative races — we lost seats in Billings that we should have won.

Basically what happened in the primary was that 3 Billings Republicans split the conservative vote, leaving the “moderate” Bob Brown to win the nomination. He was a poor candidate, and it was over before the race against Schweitzer ever started. (The Billings Republican who came in a distant second is now in federal prison for securities fraud, so there was a silver lining behind that loss.)

One factor that helped Schweitzer was that he picked Republican state Sen. John Bohlinger of Billings to be his running mate. They trumpeted around that it was a bipartisan ticket, and all of that.

Now, Bohlinger was the Jim Jeffords of the state legislature. Never saw a Democratic bill he didn’t like, an never saw a Republican bill he did like. And it kept getting worse as the years went by.

He represented a heavily Democratic section of Billings, so he could never be challenged successfully in a primary, and the GOP basically learned to accept him. We had such big legislative majorities in the 1990’s that it didn’t matter.

We Republicans are much more tolerant of diversity than Dems are, and that came back to bite us when Schweitzer picked Bohlinger to run with him and Bohlinger accepted. Suddenly, the Democratic ticket had a Billings Republican with high name recognition and who the Yellowstone County GOP had never criticized as they perhaps should have.

So that played a role. Now, the Dems think that this will work again in 2008, but I don’t think it will. Roy Brown is a real Billings Republican (which means that he is solidly conservative but can’t be portrayed as a “wingnut,) and Lt. Gov. Bohlinger has been a snide lap dog who continues to claim to be a Republican, but who trashes Republicans every chance he gets.

Roy Brown will carry Yellowstone County — the question is whether we can help him carry the vote here and in other GOP strongholds by margins big enough to make the difference.

Can't speak for what 2008 will be, but here are the results from 2006. Like I said -- solidly GOP.

Yes — but also just solid citizen retirees cashing out on their houses on the coasts who can make their retirement dollars last longer.

The more recent influx is more liberal, but Republicans haven’t always done a good enough job of making the party attractive to newcomers, always, either.

Part of the GOP dominance in the 1990’s was fueled by conservatives fleeing the West Coast for Montana. I believe that there are even more who may be on the way.

Actually Flathead tends to vote pretty solidly Republican.

Missoula is a very different matter.

You just voiced the opinion of probably 40% of the Montana population.

A recent poll had him in the 60’s in approval ratings, but when asked whether he should be re-elected, the number dropped to 57% against a generic Republican opponent.

Roy Brown has high name recognition and is a tireless campaigner who will not be underfunded. Schweitzer won Yellowstone County (Billings) in the last election, but was running against a rather liberal Republican from the western part of the state.

Brown should carry Yellowstone County, and that alone will put him in a very different ball-game.

So I’d estimate that Brown easily is starting at no more than a 55-45 disadvantage.

That’s a winnable race.

Yes he is — and he can. We will need to get money into his campaign, of course. One of the good things about his being from Billings is that this is traditionally the heart of Republican fund-raising country in Montana.

We know that while Schweitzer will get plenty of out-of-state money, we can’t expect the national GOP to come up with any money for us in this race.

“Sounds like he has run up against the term limit and must seek another job.”

Actually, no. He term-limited out of the House, but is only in his first term as a state Senator, so he could easily have waited to run for the open governor’s seat in 2012, when he would be safely in the middle of his second Senate term.

Obviously, Brown is a serious candidate who wouldn’t run if he didn’t think he had a chance of upending a popular incumbent Governor. Still, it is a long shot, and he seems to be doing this in no small part because he understands that unless the governor has a strong opponent, we will suffer heavy losses in the legislature.

In other words, old-fashioned as it sounds, he is doing it at least in part out of a sense of duty, and taking one for the team.

Well, this is Montana.

So, he is either a “liberal Republican” or a “right-wing crazy” — depending on which extreme ends of the spectrum one comes from.

Truth? He’s conservative: on taxes, on spending, on economic development, on moral issues, the works. The people who are his big supporters are very conservative.

Very solid. We’re lucky to have him running.

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Roy Brown will be a very strong candidate running against a formidable Democratic incumbent. Further commentary at Montana Headlines, and more here.