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

Taylor and state Republicans appeared to be having more and more success in spreading the message that, on the great majority of issues, Baucus has voted against the White House and with Sen. Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and other liberal Democrats. For instance, the Montana Republican Party noted on its Website (www.mtgop.org), Baucus had voted 78 percent of the time with his Democratic colleague Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York state, no favorite in farm-and-ranch country. The liberal group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) gave him an 80 percent rating for 2001 and 95 percent for 1999, when his re-election was not immediately at issue. In the current session of Congress, Baucus voted against confirming Attorney General John Ashcroft, is sponsoring a bill that would reverse much of the welfare-reform act Republicans passed in 1996 and, in an issue close to Montana, he opposes Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative to let loggers clear more dying trees to prevent forest fires.

It always was an uphill battle for Taylor. Baucus, 60, first was elected to the Senate in 1978 and, when the Democrats took control in 2001 after Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords was promised the kitchen sink by Democrats to became an independent and give them control, Baucus became chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over taxes, Social Security and Medicare. Baucus had raised in excess of $5 million for his campaign, much of it from out of state, more than five times as much as Taylor, who had been paying many of his own campaign bills.

Yet the veteran left-wing politician was fighting demographic shifts and changing political allegiances in his state. As reporter Johnson puts it, "Baucus is the lone surviving major Democrat" in a state that is dominated by Republicans. In 1988, Republican Conrad Burns beat the Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent John Melcher and has served ever since. Republicans control both houses of the state Legislature. And the last time a Democrat served as governor was in the late 1980s.

Sensing a possibility that Baucus could be ousted, some Republican heavy-hitters had trekked out to Montana to campaign and raise money for Taylor. These included Vice President Dick Cheney, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist, who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Public polls were infrequent, and because the GOP's stunningly close internal polling never was released, it was hard for outsiders to know how close the race really was. The last public poll was conducted Sept. 22-24, after an interval of more than a month. A Mason-Dixon poll for the Lee Newspapers surveyed 626 registered voters and showed Baucus leading Taylor 54 to 36 percent. But GOP chairman Miller insisted for weeks that the Mason-Dixon numbers were "so far off from where our internal polling is that it gives us reason to doubt them." Others simply noted that Baucus started running his glitzy ad with Bush just before the Mason-Dixon poll was conducted, while the Taylor campaign's ad responding that Bush in fact had endorsed Taylor, not Baucus, did not appear until just after the poll.