There's another Congressional race in Idaho, one that doesn't get as much attention, because neither candidate is an extremist. And because the Democrat in the race, former state legislator Jim Hansen, is taking no PAC money. he's accepting only donations from individuals, with a limit of $100. It's a seemingly quixotic race against Mike Simpson, the four-term incumbent (he's the one who threatened to throw Bill Sali out of a window when he was in the state legislature). I caught up with Jim (someone I've known for close to 20 years now) at the senior center in the town where I went to grade school, Fairfield.
Despite his self-imposed fundraising limitations, Jim has raised over $150,000 from more than 2,000 donors. He's been to every county in the district (and it's big, almost the entire bottom part of the state), most of them more than once. He spends a few days talking to the postmaster, visiting local businesses, appearing on the radio and in the local newspapers. He's gone to all of the parades, has talked to every mayor, and knows what's happening in each community. It also helps that his father, Orval Hansen, was a well-respected and moderate Republican who served the district in Congress in the late sixties and early seventies.
By contrast, Simpson is going through the motions in the campaign. He has refused to go to most of the candidate forums, and has been on just one bus tour through the district. And if people wanted to see him while he was in their town, they had to make an appointment. Simpson certainly isn't the worst federal representative Idaho has ever had (I think that would be damning him with faint praise) but his campaign style does reflect an incumbent increasingly out of touch with his constituency.
Here's some of what Jim told me about what people are telling out in Idaho's second district, a heavily rural and agriculture-dependent part of the state, with a large Mormon population. Primarily, he's hearing discontent from traditional Republicans:
You don't want them to feel bad that they voted for Bush. They don't want to feel bad that they're Republicans. Although there's a lot of people, instead of saying "I'm a Republican and I'm voting for you," they're saying "This year, I'm independent."
Virtually all of my family are Republicans, and some of them are very conservative Republicans, but, boy, they say "This is not the Republican party that we grew up with, that holds contempt for people of faith, that spends like there's no tomorrow. There's this duplicity that people are sensing, and they're going to be quiet about telling others, but you're going to see some changes on election night. We already are. People have already told me that they've voted for me.
This echoes so much what all the candidates I've talked to in the western states have told me they get from Republicans. And I heard it myself from one of the long-time residents of Fairfield--a very conservative member of the Community Church (a fundamentalist church) who teased me greatly about being back in town for politics, just like my dad.
The rest of our conversation follows on the flip.
At the end of the lunch, we were saying good-bye, and she volunteered a bit of her displeasure. Not wanting to push it, I just mentioned that it had been a bad few years. "Two years?!?! It's been an awful six years, if you ask me!" When George Bush has lost Bonnie Sweet in Fairfield, Idaho, you know the Republicans are in trouble.
Finally, I asked Jim about what motivated his race, and particularly his push for public financing of campaigns, for a more locally-based, locally-funded, and bottom-up process. He's seen the impact that the 50 state strategy has had in Idaho, and likes it. His approach to politics is heartening. It will sound naive, but that doesn't make it any less signficant.
If we're calling ourselves Democrats, we have to constantly think about where does the power lie. It lies in the community level. The state organization has to be accountable to the community level. The federal level has to be accountable to the state and the community. And not the corporate model that DC insiders like with a top group of these people who think they're the brightest things in teh world and they get to decide how everything is allocated.
I don't expect the revolution to start in Idaho. I don't expect Jim Hansen to come out of nowhere to defeat Mike Simpson. But I do suspect he's going to poll better than the conventional wisdom would allow, and I hope that that success can give him some leverage to push his campaign finance reform ideas at the state level. Idaho would be an excellent place to give it a try.
On the Web:
Jim Hansen for Idaho
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Now, if you'll indulge me a bit, here's a little photo tour of my old home. It might give you an idea why I'm so drawn to Idaho, and states like Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana.
This is (or was--it's long since been closed) the Corral Store. It marks the seat of Corral, the unincorporated community of farms and ranches I grew up in. We'd get some groceries here, beer during branding, or milk when the cow wasn't producing. It was a regular little general store, with work gloves, hand tools, all the little basic things you needed when you lived out in the boondocks. We lived about a mile north of here.
Here's Main Street in Fairfield, about 10 miles from Corral, and where I went to grade school.
The Camas County court house:
The city park (it's a little bit bigger than this picture shows, but not too much):
My grade school. It's closed now, and they're talking about tearing it down. It's nearing in on its centennial year, so I hope they can figure out how to save it.