Bob Kelleher: Now More Than Ever.
The prominent Montana liberal blog “Left In the West” once referred to me as a “Kelleher fan”. It’s mixed. I am one that takes an interest in perenial oddball candidates — those people who throw out their good money to put their name onto the ballot as a sort of hobby, maybe they have some ideas they wish to float out and maybe they don’t. Relating to Kelleher versus Baucus, I was something of a Baucus basher as much as a Kelleher fan — though, not in any major way, ala: I’m not going to seriously contemplate a Kelleher Senate victory. It was what it was.
Bob Kelleher was an accidental Republican nominee, the vaguely familiar name out of a few no names with dented reputations. It is probably unkknowable what motivated Kelleher to run as a Republican after fourteen runs as a Democrat or Green, but it worked out electorally for him. He got himself a major party statewide nomination with it. It is the same logic that worked for Max Baucus, who reportedly started his career by asking which party would get him elected.
The Health Care process is apparently one where several Senate committees create a bill, and these bills will through some unholy process just be smashed and collided together to form something. Max Baucus is now the chief architect of one that is being summarily booed. Instructive would be to compare it with the Bob Dole proposals of 1993 — 1994, and on to Bill Maher’s comments about the Democrats having moved right while the Republicans have moved into a bin, and Michael Steele’s comment that the co-op is a backdoor to that dreaded public option, interesting because the public option was always a back-door to Single-payer, leaving me to wonder what might be offered to gain Olympia Snowe’s vote which would fail to do so because of it being a back-door to a dreaded Co-op.
Curiously, Fox News went ahead and designated Max Baucus with the “R”. It is a bit reminescent of this comment. I am one willing to treat Fox News as something to study in a Sovietology manner — they have a history of designating unworthy Republicans with the “D” label. This may as well mean some sort of cryptic support for Baucus’s Health Insurance Industry Protection Racket.
The question popping up in my mind: let’s say Mr. Kelleher had won this senate seat. Then what? We’d have a nutty and curmudgeonly socialist in the Republican party, probably ineffective as all gets out and with anti-abortion rhetoric that would forbid him from supporting anything the Democrats spit out on Health Care. The Senate Finance Committee would fall to — quick: who’s the ranking member, Kent Conrad or Jay Rockefellar? Might the addition by subtraction put us all in good stead?