Montana Conservatives Of Both Parties Going After Progressive Democrat Franke Wilmer

We haven't been shy about our support for Democratic state Rep. Franke Wilmer, who's running for Congress as she finishes up her third term representing the people of Bozeman in Helena. We opened an ActBlue donation page for her. I hope you'll want to avail yourself of it after you read the following information.

Yesterday I ran across a post at a trustworthy Montana blog, Intelligent Discontent, by someone I had never read anything by before. The point of the post, at least from my perspective, seemed to be that in Montana's Democratic congressional race, Missoula City Councilman Dave Strohmaier can't win but can take away enough progressive votes from Franke Wilmer so that the race will be a contest between the two right-of-center business-oriented Dems, Diane Smith and Kim Gillan, two woman whose past predicts they would be voting with Boehner and Cantor on all sorts of issues-- and with the worst of the Inside-the-Beltway, anti-change Democrats as a default position. What didn't make any sense to me is why M. Storin, the author, didn't just take it from the position that Smith and Gillan would both be appealing to the same low-info group of conservatives and would split that vote, leaving Wilmer to win the primary.

I haven't found a single Democrat from Montana who even accepts Smith as a Democrat. "She's a Republican ringer who calls herself a Democrat," a long time friend from Kalispell told me. And he knows her. A smart, progressive ex-legislator from Flathead, a farmer, engineer and writer says Smith is "a DC former corporate executive and lobbyist, supported Republicans who ran for Whitefish City Council and has relentlessly worked to degrade the Whitefish drinking water quality regulations." That was kind compared to some of the other coverage from trusted Democratic sources. James Connor's Flathead Memo posed the straight forward question, Diane Smith: Ringer? Recovering Republican? Rich Opportunist? None of that sounds very enticing.

We know little about Smith’s political philosophy. Her announcement of candidacy promised to get the government off the backs of businesses. That’s consistent with a true blue Republican or a Blue Dog Democrat, but not with a New Deal Democrat. Although her interest in running dates back several months, her website contains no platform, no section on issues.

But we do know something about her history of political contributions. It sends a mixed message at best, and some of her contributions are deeply troubling for Democrats.

If her record of political donations is any indication of what Montana Democrats could expect of her, they might as well vote for Steve Daines. She's donated money to corrupt right-wing Senator Conrad Burns (R), to current Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg, a member of Michele Bachmann's Tea Party Caucus, and to three White Fish Republican/Tea Party candidates, Doug Wise, Turner Askew and Mary Vail (a couple of months ago). While she lived in Virginia and worked as a DC lobbyist she donated to conservatives in both parties, including Arkansas reactionary fanatic Jay Dickey.

[H]er contributions to Askew, Vail, and Wise-- all candidates in the 2011 municipal elections in Whitefish-- are especially troubling. The election is officially nonpartisan, but those are not the candidates local Democrats are supporting.

Equally important, she’s much more pro-business than her campaign leads you to believe. On her campaign website she says:

Diane Smith is a Montana-based entrepreneur and businesswoman, who is active in Montana’s business community.

Smith co-founded a hi-tech digital video company called Avail-TVN in Kalispell, Montana. The company has grown to more than $150 million in annual sales, with its technology jobs based in Montana. Smith, having worked in emerging technologies and consulted with numerous start-ups in Montana, knows what it takes to start a business from scratch, and provide good jobs and a future for Montana. Smith moved to Montana in 2002, after working in fast-growth telecommunications companies that deployed new technologies such as long distance and wireless.

But on her North Fork Strategies website she says (in part):

Diane was a senior executive with Alltel Corporation from 1988-2002, where she managed teams of public policy specialists to maximize the company’s opportunity for success in the rapidly changing local exchange and wireless industries.

In 1994, Diane co-founded the Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance, which successfully advocated for independent telephone company interests in the years leading up to the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Her telecom career began with Sprint, where for five years she represented the start-up long distance company before state and federal agencies and legislatures in the first years of emerging competition in the long distance market.

She chairs the Board of the Capitol Connection, a media subsidiary of George Mason University in Virginia, serves on the Advisory Board of the Mobile Future Coalition based in Washington, DC, and is a member of the Montana Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs. She often advises start-up businesses on their political and business strategies.

In other words, she was a corporate lobbyist. And for all practical purposes, she still is.

And that’s not all. A number of bloggers think she consorts with the wrong people.

...So why is she running as a Democrat? One possibility: social issues. If she’s pro-choice, there’s no place for her in the Republican Party. Another possibility: the Democratic primary is a cheap date compared to waltzing with rich Steve Daines in the Republican primary. Perhaps both.

Democrats in Whitefish had to spend a lot of money defeating Smith's three Tea Party candidates for City Commission. No one was amused and that left a bitter taste. I just can't see how Montana voters, voting in a Democratic primary, or even independent moderates will not find a newcomer like corporate lobbyist Smith an attractive candidate. Clearly, if she keeps going with this primary she's going to wind up pulling votes from Kim Gillan since both position themselves as "pro-business moderate/conservative Democrats." The local rumors that she made her fortune in online porn probably aren't going to help either. She's more likely to drive up the cost of the primary for Democrats than actually win it. And she's going to be a major pain in the ass for Gillan, the other conservative in the race.

Officially, the DCCC is neutral in this race, although several people have told me that they're doing their regular whispering campaign for Gillan, as they always do when a conservative squares off against a progressive. If Democrats in Montana know Gillan for one vote it was her vote in favor of the deregulation of Montana Power Company, in which she was one of a handful of Democrats who voted with the Republicans to sell Montana's citizen-owned energy and dams. No Democrat who voted for that bill has ever gone on to win statewide office. And I have to believe that that will become the center of attacks against her once people start paying attention to the race. I'm hearing she's basically unelectable because of that vote alone. But her miserable voting record on women's choice may please some Republicans but isn't going to help her much in a Democratic primary. In 1999 her record was 20% pro-choice. That doesn't cut it-- although the big donors from Billings, along with the personal friends and family out of state who are financing her campaign, don't mind.

Gillan's 20% choice vote may not be enough to get untrustworthy transactional political hacks like EMILY's List or NARAL break with the DCCC over Gillan-- they almost never do-- but that, coupled with the deregulation vote, shows a pattern of throwing core Democratic values under the bus and jumping to the Republican side when she's most needed. Voters, especially pro-choice voters, will rightly be concerned that she is unpredictable and unreliable as a vote for Democratic values on key issues-- or do Montana primary voters want to empower another Bart Stupak or Ben Nelson?  

Storin's post at Intelligent Discontent repeats the DCCC-whispered talking points they're telling donors, that "Franke’s money numbers raise some serious concerns. Since announcing, she’s already burned up about 40% of the $105,000 she’s raised and gained little traction from it." Almost word-for-word, straight from the conservatives who run the DCCC. What goes unmentioned is that Franke has the highest number of donors by far-- of anyone on either side of the aisle-- which means points to something the DCCC has nothing but disdain for, a grassroots campaign, fueled by real voters rather than by well-healed lobbyists and insiders. If I'm piecing together FEC statements and political intelligence correctly, she has something like 2,500 donors who are overwhelmingly in-state small donors, i.e., people who can vote. In the most current report, it looks like over 95% of her funding was from small in-state donors. There's no more healthy sign for a campaign than that, despite the way Steve Israel may be spinning it. In Montana, support from blogger jhwygirl means more than support from Steve Israel. This week jhwygirl argued for her election.

Would I trust her with my tax dollar? You bet. Franke Wilmer worked her way through undergraduate and graduate school-- and obtained scholarships to help obtain her doctorate in Government & Politics in 1990. So does she know the value of a dollar? I’m betting she knows the value of a nickel and dime.

All that being said, I wondered what she had to say about yesterday’s failure of the super committee. I was never very hopeful about what they would (or wouldn’t) do-- but as someone actually applying for a job in congress, I had to wonder what Wilmer-- an experienced legislator-- had to think about the super committee and the task they had before them.

Ms. Wilmer generously took time out of her 16 hour days to reply:

“It seems like any news you get of Washington these days is either disappointing or crazy. Making pizza a vegetable was crazy, and the Super Committee failing to come to an agreement is disappointing. I think Congress may be the only place in America where you can ask 12 people to take 2 months to come up with a solution to an important problem and end up with nothing. It is unbelievable that 12 people couldn’t find $1.2 trillion in wasteful spending. Ending the Bush tax cuts just to the top 1% would be a good place to start. Or ending the tax breaks to corporations that export our jobs overseas. Don’t forget how much we are spending on wars ($1.2 trillion so far).

Then one of the richest members of Congress, Denny Rehberg, comes out with his “viable” option. In his mind there are really only two options-- either cut Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans Benefits or defund programs set up to help people cover outrageous health care costs. In his mind cutting the wasteful spending to defense contractors (the Commission on Wartime Contracting reported to Congress that $60 billion alone has been lost to waste and fraud in war spending) or cutting subsidies to the oil and gas companies would be insane. Insisting on cuts to Social Security is the wrong place for Republicans to draw a line in the sand. Senior citizens didn’t cause this recession. Congressman Rehberg ironically decided people can live without health care and presented his “viable” plan.

There was a time in this country where our elected leaders governed using common sense. There was a time where the issues facing this country were more important than the next election. I am running for Congress to help restore some of those principles in Washington.”

I couldn’t agree more. How many politicians-- especially those running for office-- are willing to unequivocally call for ending the Bush tax cuts for the top 1%? Or cutting tax breaks to corporations that export our jobs overseas.

I also appreciate a candidate like Wilmer who is willing to step up for Veterans and call hypocrisy on our current U.S. Representative Denny Rehberg who is willing to cut Social Security and allow the Pentagon to continue its wasteful (and immoral) spending on defense contractors. Montana’s median income is in the bottom 25% in ranking-- and only one state has higher per capita military service than Montana. Protecting Veterans and Social Security should be a priority for the people we Montanan’s elect to congress.

It’s good to know that it’s a priority for Franke Wilmer.

This is a race rapidly boiling down to a classic Blue Dogs type-- whether Gillan or Smith-- vs a true populist/progressive, Franke Wilmer. If you're a regular DWT reader you're probably looking for the real thing. If you'd like to help, you can do it here.