Jore watch: Gazette letters to the editor

The Jore "letter watch" continues at Montana Headlines.

In news that is almost as astonishing as the Davison plea, the Gazette's streak of publishing letters to the editor smearing Rick Jore ended today.

From December 16th through 19th, the Gazette published "Rick Jore is a Neanderthal" letters for 4 straight days and in 5 out of the previous 7 issues. If we include the Gazette editors' own "thumbs down" on the 11th, that makes an incredible six opinion page attacks on Jore over the course of only 9 days.

A quick and unscientific Montana Headlines survey found no other topic that merited even two letters in that same time period.

The burning question is: how long can the Gazette editors resist returning to what appears to be their method of choice to attack Jore and the House Republican leadership? It is a safe tactic, since Jore hasn't yet done anything for which he can be criticized in "hard news" pages.

Readers should watch with bated breath to learn the answer.

More to the point, Jore has become intensely interesting to everyone. If House Speaker Scott Sales has any doubt about whether he made the right choice to head the Education Committee, the negative attention in the Gazette opinion pages should remove it. Anyone who gets that kind of press has got to be good for Republican interests and bad for Democrat interests.

The relevance of Davison's politics

For identification purposes, Pat Davison is probably best known in Billings as having run for governor in the Republican primary, where he lost (badly) to Bob Brown. It establishes an interesting part of the story -- namely that he was a reasonably respected member of the community who betrayed the trust of those he took advantage of in his investment schemes. Republicans, moreover, are just going to have to take some lumps on this one because he was one of their own.

Montana Headlines will be watching the Gazette closely, however, to see how many times they can mention his involvement in Republican politics in conjunction with this story.

The truth is that at this point, Davison's name is widely known for one reason, and one reason only -- his defrauding of investors and his pleading guilty on federal charges.

At a certain point, the facts that he came in a distant 2nd in a Republican primary, that he was appointed to the Board of Regents by Gov. Racicot, or that he was involved in promoting the Otter Creek coal development disappears into irrelevance in the immense shadow of his crimes. Right now, no-one needs to be reminded of his gubernatorial bid in order to know who he is.

It is hard not to be suspicious that the Gazette will run a disproportionate share of articles on this story over the coming months -- just happening to mention the Republican party in all of them.

When reading the congratulatory article on Democrat State Auditor John Morrison's role in the case, one looks for any mentions of his politics. We are fast approaching the point where it is probably just as relevant for the Gazette to include in each article a reference to "former Democratic Senate candidate John Morrison, who came under fire for being lax as State Auditor in investigating the white collar crimes of his former lover's fiance."

Cautionary tale

With Pat Davison's guilty plea, any hopes that his friends and former political allies might have had that all of the charges were a big mistake disappeared.

There never was much hope, but it was sobering to consider that someone who was actively engaging in a "Ponzi scheme" would have the gall to run for public office.

There were those who thought that Davison had a better chance to defeat now Governor Schweitzer than did Bob Brown. This may have been true, but what a disaster a Davison win -- even in the primary -- would have been.

There was once a time when party leaders would take a potential candidate behind closed doors and grill him about every possible skeleton in the proverbial closet. This is assuming that a candidate with a "history" cared so little about his own party as to run in the first place.

Davison was willing to set the Republican party back a generation in Montana for the sake of his own political ambitions, for that is exactly what would have happened had this article been published today about a Governor Davison, rather than failed GOP primary candidate Davison.

Davison's principle backers were likewise guilty of failing to scrutinize his business dealings.

It is one thing to get caught up in the ubiquitous fund-raising cycle of Washington once elected, as did Conrad Burns (and has basically every Congressman and Senator, because of the astronomical amounts of money that have to be raised for every campaign.)

It is quite another to break the law repeatedly and then to run for a major public office -- raising money and soliciting support from unsuspecting party members who now probably can't help but be embarrassed about their involvement with Davison.

Republicans will have no chance at regaining lost ground in Montana politics without policing their own ranks on matters like this. After all, as Conrad Burns learned, one not only has to run against the Democrat candidate, but against the press as well. There is no room for small errors, let alone suicidal actions like Davison's.