Big Sky Cairn

Before I begin my argument, I thought I might offer you a bit of background on myself. I’m a gun owner, a member of the Butte Gun Club and an NRA member. So, needless to say, I count a candidate’s position on second amendment rights among my top five electoral considerations.

Earlier this week, Erik Iverson penned a guest column for the Missoulian about Barack Obama’s stance on gun rights. This editorial prompted a scathing critique by Pete Talbot at 4&20 Blackbirds, who argued that there was very little evidence to suggest that gun owners should be concerned about an Obama Administration.

Talbot states, “Obama has already stated that he’s a defender of the Second Amendment.” But saying that you’re a defender of Second Amendment rights and proving it are two very different things. After all, there must be a reason why the National Rifle Association gave Obama an F rating three times in six years.

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Yesterday on Montana Headlines, we took note of Montana Democrats distancing themselves from Sen. Obama over his recent comments at a San Francisco fundraiser. 

While there has been a lot of ink spilled over Obama’s “guns and religion” comments, today’s piece by George Will is particularly worth reading.  We’ve been enjoying Will more of late — he is drifting back toward his more old-fashioned conservative roots.  Like the recently passed dean of conservative writers and thinkers, William F. Buckley, Jr., Will has been increasingly critical of the Iraq War and the abandonment of the principles of limited government and fiscal discipline by many Republicans in recent years.

In this column, Will reminds us that Obama’s statement is just part of a continuum of American liberal thought that has a long history:

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority.”

He quotes Michael Barone as writing:

“Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture - the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.”

Will continues by saying that Obama’s comment is in line with an approach pioneered by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter: 

The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders - a “paranoid style” of politics rooted in “status anxiety,” etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.

One recalls Lionel Trilling’s famous comment in the post-war era that American conservatives had no ideas, only “irritable mental gestures.” 

Anyone who has read Albert Jay Nock, Donald Davidson, or John Don Passos knows that Trilling was exaggerating about the right having a lack of intellectual credibility (but to be fair, all one has to do is read Jeffrey Hart’s New Criterion retrospective on WFB’s mentor at Yale, Wilmoore Kendall, to know that the “irritable” part wasn’t exactly groundless.)   

Such attitudes toward the right are convenient — the progressive/liberal wins debates by default because the opposition simply has psychological “issues” and is not worthy of debating.  And so the endless task of reminding the public that there are options — preferable options — to the solution offered by Sen. Obama.  That solution is a sort of progressive ”end of history” notion in which we will be swept up by the rapturous winds of change and converted to the true faith.  And because it is so inspiring and wrapped in colorful “post-partisan” rhetoric — we aren’t supposed to notice that it’s just the same old leftist pablum, preached with the same aloof hauteur that we have come to know so well.

The balance of the United States Senate majority hung on 3,562 votes right here in Montana. For some reason - probably because national media decided to focus on the 8,805 margin of victory in Virginia which is closer to Washington, DC and easier to cover - this story hasn’t been told.

On November 7, by a margin of 3,562 votes, Montana replaced Republican Conrad Burns with Democrat Jon Tester and in doing so gave Democrats the one seat they needed to put them over the 50-50 mark and into the majority.

So when the question is posed, can Obama win in Montana? Yes, he can. Or more accurately, McCain can lose like Burns did. In the waning months of the 2006 election, I did some volunteer work for the Burns campaign that included some unpleasant phone calls. I lost track of the number of people I talked to who considered themselves conservative Republicans, were proudly voting for Rehberg but were not going to vote for Burns. Statewide, this sentiment was enough to cost Burns the election.

I hear a lot of the same comments from Montana conservatives about McCain - they will never vote for him, they’d rather not vote. This is a serious problem for McCain, just like it was for Burns. I’m not saying that voters did anything wrong here - the truth is, it was Burns’ fault that he lost these voters and he should have been more careful.

At the same time, the stubborn refusal to vote for the more conservative candidate had real consequences. 3,562 of them gave Harry Reid the Senate Majority. The consequences for the Presidency over the next four years are going to be even more profound.

The questions therefore, are whether McCain can win back support from the conservative base or, barring that, whether he can pick up enough votes from the independent center as he loses from the right.

The campaigns are aflutter with Barack Obama’s latest words of hope.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not, and it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”

Treating middle America like a bunch of weapon wielding, xenophobic, neanderthals aside; I am a bit surprised Obama would say being anti-trade is an irrational reaction to financial struggles. Probably not the best statement to make the weekend before the Pennsylvania primary.

Obama is not doing himself any favor in the rust belt with misguided speeches like this. All you have to do is take a look at the electoral college maps. While Obama opens up avenues in some unusual places (Texas), it is offset by Republican gains in places like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

When the Montana Headlines post appeared in which we viewed the governor’s visit to the Hardin Prison as being perhaps yet more evidence of him feeling the heat in his re-election campaign against Roy Brown, it was greeted with derision on the sinister side of the Montana blogosphere. So be it — and now here comes more of the same, likely on both counts.

Because now we have the governor criticizing the likely Democratic nominee for President, Sen. Barack Obama (the more popular in Montana between Obama and Clinton, no less,) on a number of issues. The sinestras are of course, deeply disappointed in the governor — but don’t worry governor, it won’t last long.

The governor predicts that McCain will win Montana against either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama, because of one word — guns. In fact, the governor is in such a blistering, blustery hurry to show that he is pro-gun that he hands a loaded high-powered rifle to a reporter who was in the process of telling the governor that he he didn’t know the first thing about guns.

Indoors. Within city the city limits of Helena.

Let’s just say that it was a sure-fire way to make sure that the episode got into the national news. We’d like to think that the average Montana hunter wouldn’t be at all impressed by this stunt. But then, as the governor likes to point out, he believes that the average Montanan doesn’t hunt or ride horses — he just likes the idea of horses and hunting. So the governor believes all he needs to do is hold a gun while sitting on the back of a horse, shooting campaign commercials. It worked against Bob Brown, anyway. Against Roy Brown? Yet to be seen.

Getting back to the point at hand, though, if the governor were feeling confident about his re-election bid against Roy Brown, one would think that he would be talking up the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, trying to deliver Montana for him — not throwing him under the bus.