Smear tactics cloud big sky country: when Republican Mike Taylor began to dispel the claim that Sen. Max Baucus was the favored candidate of President Bush, democrats smeared Taylor as gay

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 29, 2002 | by John Berlau

On Oct. 10, a dramatic turn of events catapulted what had been a quiet Montana Senate race onto the nation's front pages. Mike Taylor, the Republican candidate challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, called a press conference and pulled out of the race, citing a widely televised ad--funded by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington but with the Montana Democratic Party's name on it--that strongly implied Taylor was a homosexual. The Washington-made Democratic Party ad showed an old video of Taylor--a 61-year-old hair-care entrepreneur who has been married for 22 years and has two sons and a grandchild--wearing disco regalia in the early 1980s while applying lotion to the face of another man.

And never mind that the old footage was from a televised demonstration of personal-care techniques that he did twice a week on a family-hour program in Denver. Never mind, too, that the frames were carefully snipped to hide the fact that most of the demonstrations were with women, not men.

"Not in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that a sitting U.S. senator ... would sanction the use of 20-year-old pictures of me for the most despicable of insinuations about my character," Taylor said at an emotional press conference in which he announced that he was ending his campaign out of disgust.

Among the many questions raised by this ugly ad and Taylor's withdrawal is why Democratic supporters of Baucus, who now claim he was heading for a comfortable win, spent $100,000 and risked so much to run such an ad. Noting that throughout the race the Baucus campaign never released its internal polls, experienced observers in Montana and elsewhere say the contest was a close one. "I think the Democrats must have been more afraid of us than anyone thought," says Bowen Greenwood, communication director for Taylor and a veteran of the successful Montana congressional campaigns of Republican Rep. Dennis Rehberg and former congressman Rick Hill. Ken Miller, chairman of the Montana Republican Party, tells INSIGHT that in fact internal party polls showed Taylor, within the margin of error, in a statistical tie with Baucus as recently as three weeks ago.

In fact, INSIGHT had been looking into the Taylor-Baucus race for weeks and was preparing to report that Baucus was vulnerable. He was posing as a conservative and relying heavily on a few election-year agreements with President George W. Bush to cover a leftwing voting record even as Taylor was hammering home the Baucus opposition to most of Bush's priorities. Observers across the spectrum agreed that a surprise visit by Bush to Montana personally to endorse Taylor may have finished the Baucus campaign and made the contentious Democrat a laughingstock.

Immediately after the Taylor press conference, angry Montana Republicans immediately began talking about bringing in a high-profile candidate to challenge Baucus. But most agreed it probably was too late to put anyone new on the ballot. The state deadline for doing so had passed, and Montana judges are not known to be as fond of bending the law as their judicial brethren in Florida and New Jersey. While a write-in campaign was seen as possible, with campaigners permitted to hand out stickers to put on the ballot, it was hoped that Taylor might reconsider at the request of Bush or other friends, Miller said.

As INSIGHT went to press the national outrage at the Democratic Party sliming of Taylor was growing. Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh spent an hour criticizing Baucus on the day Taylor withdrew. "There's a huge amount of anger out there," Jim Gransbery, political reporter for the Billings Gazette, tells INSIGHT. "Certainly if someone well-known were to run as a write-in candidate, he might be able to win."

Whatever option is exercised, INSIGHT heard again and again, an irate Bush could make the difference by going out to Montana and making it clear that he does not support Baucus but a Republican who would help to end Democratic obstruction in the Senate. This would be very powerful because the Baucus ads have all but claimed a Bush endorsement. One shows a Rose Garden ceremony where Baucus is standing behind the president, who thanks the senator for "fantastic work to get this trade bill through the Senate." The generous Bush, reaching out to Democrats and trying to end the ugliness in Washington, also praised the senator for "doing what's right for the country" on this issue.

"He's been hugging the president as hard as he can in a state where Bush won 58 percent of the vote against [Al] Gore," says Chuck Johnson, state bureau chief for Montana's Lee Newspaper chain, who has covered Montana politics for more than 25 years. "I don't know that there's another Democratic candidate in the country who's been doing this." Johnson also notes that none of the Baucus signs or ads identify the senator as a Democrat.

The fact that Baucus was putting so much emphasis on the few instances in which he worked with Bush confirmed to state Republicans that the Democrat incumbent realized he was in trouble, despite the fact that the race was not seen as competitive among liberal editorialists in far-off Washington and New York. All that was needed to finish Baucus, observers said, was for Bush to go to Montana on behalf of Taylor and set the record straight about who he endorses. "If the president of the United States steps up in this race, we'll win," Taylor told INSIGHT on Oct. 4, just before the outrageous ads started to run. "That means coming to Montana, but remember that control of the Senate is at stake."