A line from BlueOregon linking to another line in The Washington Post about the Jeff Merkley-Gordon Smith U.S. Senate race sent me on a trip through the wayback machine to November 2007, when I wrote “Big Sky, Big Cred.”
The line is this, from Paul Kane, with emphasis added:
Ah, the best sleeper Senate race in the country right now. I think this will be the race that is the equivalent to Tester-Burns from ‘06.
WW wrote about that comparison in November 2007, shortly after U.S. Sen Jon Tester (D-Mont.) endorsed Oregon House Speaker Jeff Merkley (pictured in the doctored photo illustration above with Tester’s signature hair cut) in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary against Steve Novick and others:
With almost one year to go before the chosen Democratic candidate faces off against Republican U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, the similarities between Oregon’s Senate race and Montana’s in 2006 are striking. Like [former U.S. Sen. Conrad] Burns last year in Montana, Oregon’s Republican incumbent faces decreasing job approval ratings, according to recent polls. And the other sitting senator in both states is a long-serving Democrat: Max Baucus in Montana and Ron Wyden in Oregon.
Oregon Dems seem intent on looking to Montana and Tester in particular for inspiration—and proof that a Democrat can upset Smith, a proven vote-getter who soundly beat his Democratic opponent in 2002 with 56 percent. “He’s the new breed of Western Democrat,” Merkley spokesman Russ Kelley says of Tester.
Here’s what sent me into the wayback machine: Tester’s then-spokesman Matt McKenna in Bozeman, Mont., where I was a reporter from 2005 to 2006, took issue with the comparison. (Shortly thereafter he moved from Tester’s Montana office to former president Bill Clinton’s Harlem digs to work for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s then- promising presidential campaign.)
Anyway, here’s his response to “Big Sky, Big Cred”, taken from two separate emails:
My favorite is the part about the “striking” similarities between MT 06 and OR 08? Weren’t you here in 06? How can you possibly think that?
MT and OR couldn’t really be more different. We don’t have anything like Portland or its politics and, as you noted, Bush won big here, twice.
Also, Burns and Smith couldn’t be more different. Not to mention the very, very different relationships between Wyden/Smith and Baucus/Burns.
Despite McKenna’s protests (and Tester’s 45 percent approval rating from one anti-war group), I don’t think the Tester-Merkley comparison is going to go away.
Perhaps interesting footnote: Sen. Ron Wyden’s approval rating from that same anti-war group, Peace Action West, was 100 percent. Smith’s was 36 percent. Is Smith Oregon’s Jon Tester?!
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