The Democrats' Last, Best Hope

[Recursion]

Andrew Romano in Newsweek

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/01/the-democrats-last-best-hope.html

Trying to pick the best 4 paragraphs was tough, but here goes:

But Tester, who was elected with strong support from the netroots, is in a special bind. By doing what he says he was sent to Washington to do—represent his rural constituents—Montana’s junior senator is beginning to irk the activists and fundraisers who propelled him to victory in the first place. In December, Tester voted against the DREAM Act, which would’ve created a pathway to citizenship for the foreign-born children of illegal immigrants. His strategists insist that a yea vote would have sunk the senator in anti-“amnesty” Montana, but Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, whose followers filled Tester’s coffers with $343,000 in 2006, was furious anyway. “He is … the Democrat I will most be happy to see go down in defeat,” Moulitsas wrote. “And he will.” Tester was undeterred. As they hammered out April’s shutdown-averting budget, legislators stripped every environmental add-on from the package except one: a plan to end federal protections and allow hunting of the region’s gray wolves, which prey on livestock and game. The rider was Congress’s first-ever attempt to remove an animal from the endangered-species list, and it angered activists, with one, Michael Garrity, going so far as to compare “local control” of wolves to “turning over the civil rights problem in the ’60s to the governors of Mississippi and Alabama.” Turns out it was Tester’s handiwork. “I’m tired of the triangulation,” says Paul Edwards, a Montana environmentalist (and part-time Los Angeleno) who raised $50,000 for Tester in 2006. “You know, ‘He’s the best we’ve got. The others would be too terrible.’ Well, let ’em be terrible. Better the enemy I know than the enemy I thought was my friend.”

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Consider the gray wolf. Washington’s original recovery goal for the species was 300. That milestone was passed more than a decade ago; today the regional population exceeds 1,600. The desire to wrest control of wolves from D.C. is a classic states’-rights issue, spiked with Western machismo, and during my time with Tester it was the only topic that came up everywhere he went: hotels, coffee shops, art auctions. “What do you think about wolves?” a sixth grader asked during an assembly in Miles City. “I think we should start hunting them again!” Tester said. The kids let out their loudest cheer of the afternoon. After the event, I asked Tester about the rural-urban divide. “Maybe we should release some wolves in New York City,” he said. “You know, to clarify things.”

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When liberals warn of rapacious hunters, loggers, and financiers, they have a point. But the left’s knee-jerk reaction—to assume that Tester is a sellout instead of a Democrat struggling to represent a rural constituency—ignores the very real differences between Big Sandy and the Big Apple and reveals how unrural the party’s default setting really is. In 2006, Tester defeated Burns by a mere 3,500 votes, and with Democratic support down from its 2006-08 peak, he’ll need all the momentum he can muster. If the left decides Tester is indistinguishable from a Republican, he may be in trouble. That’s particularly true when Rehberg’s plan is to convince independents that Tester, who has voted with his party 93 percent of the time, is indistinguishable from Obama, whose Montana approval rating is 39 percent—and whom Tester himself is reluctant to compliment or invite out on the trail.

With his aide safely out of the mud, Tester heads to the garage—NAPA air compressors, orphaned car seats, empty barrels of Utz Cheese Balls—to grease up his Brandt Grain Vac, which, he brags, “can fill my semi in 20 minutes.” It’s strange to hear a senator talk about his semi, but Tester’s not alone. In other states, other rural Democrats are facing the same challenge as Tester, or will be soon: a new, wired landscape that lets them draw support from every corner of the country but holds them to a one-size-fits-all standard of urban liberalism in return. It’s Tip O’Neill’s famous axiom in reverse: now all politics is national. Tester, for one, is aware that he’s a throwback, with all the related risks and rewards. “When I’m spending 16 hours on a tractor, it gives me some opportunity to sort through issues in solitude,” he tells me. “That’s the way the old-timers did it, the Washingtons and the Jeffersons.” He pauses and glances out the window, across the winter wheat fields. “But it’s a different world now.”