With Al Hunt gone from the
Wall Street Journal, his Thursday column has been replaced him with a rotation of columnists from around the country with their take on state- and local-level politics.
This week's contributor is Thomas Goltz, who wrote a generally positive piece about a Daily Kos favorite, Governor Brian Schweitzer.
This is how Goltz describes Montana and its new governor:
Red, blue or purple--color-coding Montana's patterns of voting is just too simplistic, and Brian Schweitzer fits the non-conformist mold to a T. A prosperous farmer/rancher from the area of Whitefish in the tony Flathead Valley country, Mr. Schweitzer cultivates a well-spoken, gun-owning, dog-loving, native-ritual-doing, shot-of-whiskey-drinking true-west style somewhere between that of Jeanette Rankin (a famously antiwar liberal Republican elected to the U.S. Congress before women's suffrage was passed) and Mike Mansfield (the conservative Democrat senator and former ambassador to Japan whose voting record, taken as a whole, was more liberal than that of George McGovern).
And Republicans have noticed. Goltz notes that the Montana GOP, "possibly goaded on by the GOP national leadership who fear a young star rising in the West," has been trying to play hardball with Schweitzer.
Legislative Republicans picked fights over two of Schweitzer's proposals, financial incentives for shooting movies in Montana, and regulation of the state's real estate market, stalling them in committee. When the governor confronted lawmakers, one Republican blogger wrote that "Mount Saint Schweitzer Blows His Top" and called him "an immature, egomaniacal control-freak." Hmm. That description fits George W. Bush to a T.
Republicans have also tried to play the patriotism card against Schweitzer, who has asked to bring home some of the Montana National Guard and its water-bomb helicopters from Iraq in order to cope with what's expected to be a nasty fire season. They've labeled that request as--you guessed it--"an expression of anti-war sentiment."
Looking into his crystal ball, Goltz sees a bright future for Schweitzer:
How all this sorts itself out over the short term is anybody's guess, but Mount St. Schweitzer is certainly stirring things up--from driving himself around the state with his pet dog, Jag, to flying the tribal flags of the seven Native American Indian reservations in Montana in rotation above the rotunda in the capital, a unique symbol of the governor's maverick streak.
That streak came to the fore at the annual state governors' meeting at the White House, where Mr. Schweitzer upbraided both President Bush and Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. He likened the president to a bad cattle auctioneer and Mr. Leavitt to a cowpoke "riding for the brand." National Democrats swooned at the audacity of the freshman governor from the Mountain West. And some even started to whisper a number: 2008.
If were past noon here, I'd drink to that.
