I commented before about how irrelevant Jim Hunt’s first-quarter fundraising was. What I failed to mention was that the small margin of victory Jim Hunt managed to achieve was also in a quarter that saw both major Democrat presidential candidates visit Montana - a banner month for the Party. Given this, Hunt’s numbers look more anemic than ever.
Archive for the ‘Jim Hunt’ Category
Expect Jim Hunt’s camp to come out ecstatic about out-raising Denny Rehberg in last quarter’s fundraising (is that article title a typo?). Certainly the Democrats will try to spin this as a sign that the tide has turned and Jon Tester Jim Hunt is going to send that bumbling Republican Conrad Burns Denny Rehberg packing in 2008.
Truth be told, though remember Kennedy did pretty well against Rehberg in his first quarter too, but his fundraising dropped off after that. Once your regulars max out - which they are going to do no matter what - every new dollar becomes harder to raise. It’s a bit like selling Cutco Knives - once you burn through the family and close friends - who are more or less obligated to buy a set of knives - the sales get a bit tougher.
We’ll see how Hunt does next quarter. Especially with realists in the Democrat Party saying Denny’s around until he chooses to leave in 2012 and optimists saying he may be defeated as early as 2010. Yeah, people are going to be flocking to give this lost-cause a chunk of their hard-earned money.
I’ll say it now for the record, I think Matt Singer is the most gifted political mind in the Sinestrasphere. His post on the possible Tester vs. Rehberg matchup in 2012 is certainly worth a read, if for no other reason than the double meaning of this line:
Montana Headlines is already previewing what could be the heavyweight match of the decade: a 2012 U.S. Senate battle between Sen. Jon Tester and Rep. Dennis Rehberg.
Too easy. Let’s just say that Senator Tester is a “heavyweight” in only one meaning of the word and leave it at that.
What’s more interesting is that like Art Noonan and senior Democrat Strategists, Matt Singer’s commentary seems to assume that Congressman Denny Rehberg will be a viable political candidate - a “heavyweight” - in 2012. Read between the lines and Matt Singer is acknowledging that it’s unlikely he’ll lose in 2008 or 2010. To be fair, he first refers to this match-up as “a good chance” but later refers to it in the simple future tense using “will” which removes the previously applied conditional.
Poor Jim Hunt. What’s next? A Rehberg endorsement from his Mom?
On a related note, I wonder if, by 2012, Tester will have secured that seat on the Appropriations Committee that Montana was promised… Somehow I doubt it; not a lot of first-term Senators on that Committee and like I said, Tester isn’t exactly a political heavyweight. He’s already served his purpose - no need to pander to Montana anymore.
I’ve commented on this before - the inacurate portrayal of voting records by Montana Democrats in an attempt to tie Congressman Denny Rehberg to President George W. Bush.
The Gazette has made this point (again).
U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., is getting political flak this election year over his voting record, criticized by Democrats as a yes man for President Bush and Republican policies in general.
A look at 16 key U.S. House votes in 2007 shows Rehberg siding with the president and fellow Republicans on two-thirds of those votes - and generally against them on the other third.
And this…
Rehberg said criticizing him as a Bush yes man appears to be a national “cookie-cutter campaign” drawn up by Democratic strategists in Washington, D.C., and recommended to Democratic challengers nationwide.
“He’s trying to fool Montana voters, and they’re not going to be fooled,” Rehberg said of Hunt. “These kind of charges just don’t work.”
I commented on this story before. There’s a lot of good stuff there. I mean a lot. Go read it. Even if you already read it. It’s sort of like Moby Dick - a new meaning at every reading. Inspiring.
Anyway, it’s also interesting because the part of the story that makes it fair journalism - the entire section dedicated to Montana Democrat’s spinmeistering. From it, we can catch a glimpse at what The Democrat Machine has in store for 2008 (and beyond?).
Rehberg’s biggest vulnerability, Democrats say, is his pro-war, pro-Bush record and lack of legislative initiative. He’s voted in lock step with the Bush Administration and fellow Republicans 92 percent of the time, according to the Washington Post, including votes on major issues like the federal budget, tax cuts, and the Iraq War.
This meme is likely to manifest itself quite a bit because if the man is popular you just have tie him to someone that’s not popular. That’s the politics of personal destruction that the Montana Democrats perfected with Burns in 2006, and they’re polishing up their picks to take out another bull.
Trouble is, the varas aren’t sticking, and the bull as strong as it ever was as their neophyte mariachi enters the arena.
I had some misgivings about Rob Harper and the Missoula Independent after a pretty unfair hit-piece about Erik Iverson. But the recent story, Can this man be beaten? is actually very fair which of course makes it seem tremendously bias to people used to left-wing bias in Montana reporting. Pogie’s outrage would be a lot more convincing, of course, if it wasn’t Democrats saying that Rehberg was so darn strong.
With pre-imminent name recognition, impeccable political savvy, and a formidable grassroots organization that’s 25 years in the making, Rehberg has evolved into a political machine so robust the Democrats rightly wonder if they’ve got any chance of beating him now, or any time in the near future. Some say a Demo overthrow might just have to wait until 2012.
Seems like something else is going on in 2012. Oh yeah, this guy will be running for his second term. I can’t help but think that Tester’s seat will be pretty attractive right around then for a guy that could probably have beaten Baucus this year if he’d thrown in his hat.
So that House seat is Denny’s until he abdicates or moves on to something bigger. And that according to Democrats. One would almost feel sorry for Jim Hunt if he wasn’t - you know - a personal injury trial lawyer.
So anyway, read the entire article. And see what some of the other Dextra bloggers had to say about it here, here and here.
Via Matt Singer, Tester has decided to forgo the normal policy of not taking sides in his own party’s primary and instead endorse Jim Hunt (who isn’t expected to beat Rehberg until 2010).
I love how Tester waxes eloquent about being an underdog. If memory serves, he was also a pretty significant underdog in his own primary against John Morrison. Lucky for him, his party didn’t jump on the front-runner’s bandwagon in the first two weeks and he was able to win the nomination and eventually the seat. I guess Tester probably realizes that 7th choice is better than 8th or 9th… although if you do the math the difference is pretty small.
As the mistakes keep mounting, Tester has one-and-out written all over him.
Seventh-choice Jim Hunt (who, according to MT Democrats won’t win the 2008 election until 2010) isn’t getting any national press - but “his” borrowed plan for defeat withdrawal in Iraq is. 42 candidates (a “candidate” is even less important than the least powerful members in the 535 voting members of Congress) have jumped off the cliff together which makes it newsworthy - a bit like lemmings are newsworthy when they jump off cliffs.
A few problems. For example:
The starkest difference between the group’s proposal, dubbed a “Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq,” and those embraced by many senior Democrats and the party’s presidential candidates is that it rejects the idea of leaving U.S. troops on the ground to train Iraqi security forces or engage in anti-terrorism operations. The group instead calls for a dramatic increase in regional diplomacy and the deployment of international peacekeeping forces, if necessary.
Now, I’m not an expert, but I do know that seniority is rather important in Congress. Leadership - especially in the House of Representatives - calls the shots and freshman pay their dues by voting how leadership tells them. So a group of freshmen hatching a plan that even their own Party’s leadership thinks goes too far is naive at best at best and outright disingenuous at worst.
Of course, Democratic Leadership would never be party to a lie for political gain, so they’re careful to qualify the Responsible Plan for defeat withdrawal with this bit of tactical brilliance:
“Democrats are united in our need to bring change in Iraq,” said Doug Thornell, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “It’s up to the individual candidates to determine how to best do that for their district.”
Someone please explain to me what a 435 part district-by-district Iraqi strategy looks like. Last I checked this was a national policy that could - by definition - never be addressed by any individual district.
Unless Thornell let slip a Freudian truth. Thornell isn’t worried about the battle in Iraq - which doesn’t have any district-by-district aspects at all - and is actually talking about the political battle in the voters booth this November - which is about nothing but district-by-district tactics. Thornell could just have easily said, “Democrats are united in our need to [preserve or increase our majority],” said Doug Thornell, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “It’s up to the individual candidates to determine how to best do that for their district.”
It makes a lot more sense that way, doesn’t it?
One assumes that Jim Hunt is running for Congress because he fancies himself a leader, right? So why has he spent the first month of his campaign following in the established footprints before him.
How can I illustrate my point? How about with an illustration.
What you are seeing here is the color palette - from websites and presumably printed materials - of your US House of Representatives candidates with incumbent Republican Rehberg on the left and 7th Choice Democrat Hunt on the right. See anything… I don’t know… similar?
It’s worth noting that Rehberg has been blue and yellow since 2000 (he a Cats fan or what?). I guess it’s been working pretty good for him, so Hunt decided to copy him on - get this - a platform of change.
Small thing right? Probably, but consider this. Colors are a pretty fundamental element of branding, which is one of the most fundamentally vital things that a campaign does. Quick - who’s shipping your box in a brown truck? What about a red and yellow one? Blue, orange and white? See what I’m saying?
So right out the gate, Hunt has ceded a major part of his brand to Rehberg. He’s starting the game with a deficit, and he’s throwing interceptions. Thanks to something as simple copying his opponent’s color scheme, Hunt won’t be able to gain as much ground with yard signs, billboards or full-color newspaper ads since in the fraction of a second he has to capture his audience he won’t differentiate himself from the popular incumbent.
Not that it will matter - he wasn’t going to win this year anyway.
I remember once I was engaged in a stand-off on the Kamchatka - Alaska border. I was pretty strongly entrenched on the North American side of the Bering Straight and my opponent was on the Asian side. Both of us had invested a significant number of troops to the border in an effort to discourage the other party from invading. Unfortunately for my friend and foe, he was trying to gain control of Asia - a daunting task - and an offensive from Africa had just steam-rolled into his back yard as deep as India. He needed to fortify Siam in order to protect his control in Australia.
And so, my Kamchatkan friend made a fatal error. He had invested too much into the defense of the Bering Strait border to simply give it up, and so in an effort to keep me at bay, he split his force in half, sending half South toward Siam and leaving the other half to freeze in Kamchatka. I’m sure you know how I reacted.
Suddenly, I had twice the force as he did. My casualties would still be great, but a victory was assured and strategic control of the region was at stake (a fortification in Kamchatka is much better than one in Alaska for protecting North America). And so I attacked, and of course, I won. A stand-off was escalated to a hot war because one side altered the strategic decision calculus by removing half of his force.
The lesson was that a partial withdrawal - a slow draw-down of force is a political action with dire tactical consequences for the fighting men and women. It’s a sure way to lose.
Of course, Jim Hunt’s previously discussed post about his “Responsible Plan” for defeat withdrawal in Iraq leans heavily on the opinions of retired generals and military types, who are much more informed about tactics than I am, right? The interesting thing about retired generals is that they are retired. No one is inviting them to tactical or strategic briefings anymore. The Pentagon isn’t making sure they have the most current data on enemy movements and objectives. They aren’t piped into our intelligence-gathering apparatus. They cannot have a sense of the plan beyond what the people on the ground in Iraq have decided is appropriate and safe to share with the press - and therefore the enemy. And most of them seem to be espousing their military plans from the comfort of their home libraries thousands of miles away from the theater of conflict. I guess my point is that while I totally appreciate their service, when it comes to credibility on the specific situation in Iraq, I’m not sure a retired general has much more credibility than someone who plays a lot of RISK.
I play a lot of RISK.
Most of Jim Hunt’s position on Iraq is actually someone else’s position, but I think this part might be his (after all, it uses quotation marks):
This war has claimed the lives of four thousand of our best and brightest, left tens of thousands more seriously injured, and costs taxpayers billions of dollars a week. We must start bringing our troops home, hand over the security of the country to the Iraqis, and end our role policing this bloody civil war.
So, let me see if I understand the proposed tactics here. Hunt wants to end the war; but not all at once. He wants to slowly draw down the troops leaving fewer and fewer to defend themselves against a growing enemy. Sounds like a partial withdrawal - a political action with dire tactical consequences for the fighting men and women. A great way to sacrifice even more of our best and brightest.
Like my friend in Kamchatka learned, when you slowly withdraw troops from a hostile region, things go pretty badly for those left behind once the critical bulk of your force is gone. As soon as the enemy feels they are assured a victory, attrition no longer matters and you invite attack. That why you either win the battle or withdraw completely and immediately. Playing the middle ground is a politician’s prerogative and that’s why we try to keep politicians from running the military.
Finally, Hunt adds this little beauty:
We must change our irresponsible tactics and actions, ensure Iraq is stable, and then leave.”
Well shoot. Is this all we have to do?
I don’t mean to pester, but isn’t that the current plan? Make sure Iraq is stable before we leave. Jim, be honest now. Did you borrow that from a speech by George W?
Overall, do you see what I’m driving at here? Hunt’s trying to play politics with Iraq, but he’s not doing a very good job. 1) He’s borrowing someone else’s ideas, 2) He’s mistaking “goals” for a “plan”, 3) His idea of a change in strategy is actually quite dangerous and will ultimately undermine stability while costing the lives of American soldiers, 4) His requirement of stability before withdrawal is exactly the same as the status quo and he offers no specifics for why his ideas will be better.
