Jon Tester is running scared. He’s even running away from his own party.
Tester, seeking his fourth term in the U.S. Senate, is in a tight race with Republican Tim Sheehy in an increasingly Republican state.
Tester already has been running ads pointing out when he has disagreed with the Democratic Biden administration. Then last week he said at a news conference that he would not endorse a candidate for president.
He gave two reasons, according to the Billings Gazette, neither of which made sense. First, he said, he is focused on his own race. Second, he said, “Folks want to nationalize this race, and this isn’t about national politics, this is about Montana.”
You can hear that first reason just about every Sunday on the TV news talk shows — what Calvin Trillin called the “Sabbath gasbags.” It’s the answer politicians give when they don’t want to answer a question. They use it as a pivot to instead answer a question of their own invention.
But politicians, by the nature of their job, are supposed to be able to focus on more than one thing. Go to any city council meeting and you will see those low-paid officials dealing with a dozen or more complicated and contentious issues in a couple of hours.
Tester’s second reason is even worse. Of course, his race is national. Not only has politics in general become more national, regrettably, but this race in particular could determine which party controls the Senate. That has enormous implications for the whole country.
As Tester himself said of his race in Missoula last week, “Mine isn’t the important one, it’s the one at the top. There’s a lot at stake here. There’s democracy at stake, there’s rural America at stake, there’s how we treat one another at stake.”
And it’s not as if Tester can avoid the last four years of a Democratic administration. Sheehy supporters already are running ads accusing him of lying when he said President Joe Biden seemed mentally sharp when they’ve met.
It’s quite likely Tester is telling the truth. Certainly, Biden has lost a couple of steps — maybe even a whole staircase — but people in far worse cognitive decline have periods of lucidity. On any given day, Biden is more coherent than the delirious posts Donald Trump puts up on social media.
And when the facts don’t suffice, Republicans are fully prepared to lie about the Biden administration. In an interview with this newspaper last week, Sheehy said gasoline was selling for $1.50 a gallon when Trump left office. The national average was $2.33. In Billings, it was $2.20.
Sheehy blamed Biden’s “war on American energy” for today’s expensive gasoline. But American oil production is at an all-time high, and renewable energy sources are booming.
Sheehy blamed Biden, Harris and Obama for an increase in violent crime. But violent crime has dropped both in Montana and in the nation since Trump left office.
And Sheehy said that “Jon Tester voted to let boys play girls’ sports.” Not exactly true. In March, Senate Democrats blocked the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. The bill, which would have banned males from participating in women’s sports, was opposed by a long list of sports, educational, civil rights and gay rights groups. They rightly saw it as the federal government trying to stomp its big foot on a complex emotional issue that ought to be settled at the lowest possible level. You know, the sort of government overreach that conservatives used to oppose.
Tester is no wild-eyed leftist. According to the FiveThirtyEight website, Tester voted in favor of President Trump’s positions 30 percent of the time. That’s about as often as Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, had voted for Biden’s positions by January 2023, when the website stopped being updated.
And Tester is no stranger to close races. He won his third term in 2018 over Matt Rosendale by fewer than 18,000 votes. That was the only Senate race in which he got a majority (50.3 percent) of the vote.
So, Tester may not need my advice on how to win a tight race. But if he thinks he can get re-elected by running as Republican Lite, then one of us is badly mistaken.
Between the lines is a weekly column published in the Yellowstone County News by David Crisp. David writes as he sees it from an independent and Democratic perspective.
