Friend of the Farmer
By DEIRDRE MCNAMER
Missoula, Mont.
BACK in August, I stopped by the golf club in Fort Benton, a town on the Missouri River, to get the duffers’ perspective on our Senate race between the Republican incumbent, Conrad Burns, and his Democratic challenger, Jon Tester. It was a made-for-golf day, sunny and crisp, and those in the clubhouse were clearly interested in talking about their scorecards, not politics, so I left them to it. But I called out a question as I left: Is it going to be close?
“Oh, no,” two guys said in a single voice.
“So who’s the landslide winner?” I asked
“Burns!” one said.
“Tester!” his friend said.
Then they gave each other quizzical looks, as if they realized they didn’t know each other quite as well as they’d thought they did.
I felt the same way when my father, a lifelong Republican, told me in 2004 that he had voted for John Kerry over President Bush. And I felt it again when he told me, recently, that he backs Mr. Tester for the Senate seat.
A poll by Reuters and Zogby released last week showed Mr. Tester with a statistically insignificant one percentage point lead — no landsliding in evidence — but 4 percent of those polled were undecided. Earlier last month, a poll by Rasmussen Reports showed Mr. Tester pulling 96 percent of self-identified Democrats and Mr. Burns pulling 82 percent of self-identified Republicans.
There is a certain kind of Montana Republican who makes this horse race difficult to call, and my dad is one. He’s always been a Republican, but I think of him as a small “r” one, in the sense that his loyalties are less to a party than to a brief code: minimal government, fiscal responsibility, handshake’s your word, the Bill of Rights matters, live-and-let-live. He is the son of homesteaders who came to north-central Montana in 1909, and tried to make it on a 320-acre dryland farm, and didn’t, and moved to a little town and lived out their lives.
During World War II, he piloted a B-29 bomber and flew 31 missions in the Pacific theater, and had planes shot up, and was decorated. He voted for John Kerry, he said, because he didn’t admire how the Republicans tried to trash the man’s war record.
In the 1950s and ’60s, my father operated a small oil-well-acidizing business, and, in the ’70s, he was a cattle rancher. He served a term on the Republican side of the State Legislature, sponsoring a bill to tax billboards on the basis of their size. He has long espoused higher taxes on gasoline as a way of discouraging runaway fuel consumption. We had many political arguments during the Vietnam era because he said the United States should go in and get it done, and I thought it was a tragic morass. He didn’t get very exercised about the cultural upheavals of the time, though. When his sons grew their hair long, he just shrugged. “I don’t care how long it is,” he’d say, “as long as it doesn’t get caught in the machinery.”
Now he’s almost 88 years old and, though he might disagree with me, I have the sense that his support for Mr. Tester is a way to say that he recognizes the challenger — a grandson of Montana homesteaders, a farmer who wants to fix some things in Washington — in a way that he doesn’t recognize the incumbent, Senator Burns, a former auctioneer who didn’t grow up in the state and appears to have a shady friend or two back at the Capitol.
He doesn’t elaborate on his preference, though. He calls Mr. Burns “a coyote from Missouri,” and that’s pretty much all he has to say about it. But if Jon Tester wins this very close race, it will probably be safe to say that more than a few of my dad’s fellow Republicans decided they felt the same way.
Deirdre McNamer is the author of the forthcoming novel “Red Rover.” |
