The Montana Spectator/The Last, Best Seat
Symmes, Patrick
The Last, Best Seat by Patrick Symmes T he Fourth of July rodeo in Livingston was serious business, with a sold-out crowd in their Saturday night best of broad Stetsons, Wranglers, and cowboy...
...Two representatives for 800,000 people made Montanans the best-represented citizens in the country, and they are used to seeing their politicians in person once in a while...
...I'd like to see them restore wolves to the middle of their damned cities," an angry farmer told me in eastern Montana...
...Marlenee, he said, is the only hope for keeping the "damned ecologists" from taking over the country...
...Paradise Valley is experiencing a real estate boom from all the celebrities, urban refugees, and retirees moving here...
...Regardless of the outcome, Montanans will find a silver lining in the campaign...
...Marlenee's base among conservative ranchers and farmers is eroding—some rural counties in eastern Montana lost 20 percent of their population during the 1980s—while, in the western half of the state the culture of mountain bikes, recycling, and river sandals is on the rise with an influx of immigrants from the coasts...
...The announcer said over the thunder of boots, "The kid ain't no quitter...
...Many environmentalists want to see wolves return to Montana, and the U.S...
...In the eastern flatlands, where cattle ranching and oil are king, Ron Marlenee holds court...
...By contrast the lanky Williams is prone to long, airy quotes from Montana writers Ivan Doig and William Kittredge, and likes to pontificate before audiences on his state's mystical "sense of place...
...Understandably, farmers and ranchers feel like guinea pigs in someone's experiment...
...There aren't many quitters in Montana, a fact that has produced one of the strangest House races in the nation...
...Park Service is locked in an endless internal debate over settling some of the predators in Yellowstone...
...On a Crow tribal radio station, I heard an attack ad in which Marlenee accused Williams of voting "to give your money to foreign countries, some of them our enemies," and then declared, "I have voted against foreign aid every year I've been in Congress...
...But even the fastest mouth in the West is no match for demographics...
...At times the flinty conservative congressman has seemed unable to find a safe issue...
...An old pro from Ottawa won lots of applause and $5,000 for leaping off his sprinting horse and sideswiping a steer in less than eight seconds...
...Despite the preponderance at the Livingston rodeo of Stetsons and "Montanans for Marlenee" stickers on pick-ups, the state has another side...
...By July the gap had narrowed, but Williams still had about twice as much money in his campaign coffers as Marlanee...
...Ten seconds went by, then twenty, then thirty, until it was agonizing to watch...
...activism and Williams's environmental and social liberalism...
...There was some superb rope work out in the ring, and a few bull riders went sailing through the'air...
...The two halves of the state have never much liked each other, but now they must cohabitate in a single political dwelling that, regardless of who wins in November, will leave one half unhappy...
...Williams likes the bigger towns, university audiences, and events with the artists and writers who have come to stand for the "new Montana...
...Mixing in the crowd by the bleachers I spotted an actress I recognized from films, standing with a comic who was funny a few years ago...
...Neither of the current office-holders was willing to quit, so the election now has two incumbents...
...Celebrities don't vote in Montana, but the Rocky Mountain Liberal is alive and well in the state's alpine western half, where environmentalism, unions, and Pat Williams are big...
...No matter who wins, we've managed to get rid of half our congressmen...
...Marlenee went as far as mailing out descriptions of controversial art funded by the NEA, until the explicit material was accidentally sent to some schoolchildren on the computer mailing list...
...Williams made a serious gaffe by referring to "evangelical kooks" aligned against him...
...Both men have been courting voters on the other side of the state by moving toward the political center, but there have been some spectacular stumbles...
...T he two men are as different in style as in substance...
...Ted Turner has an enormous spread down the road, and I narrowly missed Jimmy Carter (a house guest of his fellow Georgian) at the tackle shop when he stopped in for his fishing license...
...Marlenee likes small-town parades, where he often appears on horseback...
...Montana has become home (or a second home) to a large population of "outsiders...
...In Bozeman I saw Jane Fonda at the airport and Michael Keaton in a coffee shop...
...11 40 The American Spectator October 1992...
...Year after year, the two men have canceled each other's votes in Congress on issues ranging from the Gulf War to abortion, a stalemate that will come to an end in November when voters will finally have to choose between Marlenee's two-fisted conservatism and unapologetic Christian Patrick Symmes is a writer living in McLean, Virginia...
...The young cowboy who followed couldn't wrestle his steer down...
...Marlenee has in fact voted for some foreign aid bills...
...F oreign aid didn't raise a pulse with anybody I talked to, but the question of wolves has almost everyone up in arms...
...Marlenee briefly tried to tallc'up his environmental credentials, but his opponents didn't believe him and his supporters were disgusted to find him talking like a "prairie fairy...
...I can't believe there is an undecided voter in the state," a newspaper editor told me...
...Ron Marlenee, the eight-term conservative Republican from eastern Montana, is locked in what he calls "the mother of all House battles" against Pat Williams, a liberal Democrat and seven-term incumbent from the western half of the state...
...The rest of the country could learn something from us," the newspaper editor told me...
...No sooner had I turned around than I brushed against a lonely-looking Tom Brokaw, who was being studiously ignored by the crowd...
...The conflict between the old and new Montanas favors Pat Williams, and a Great Falls Tribune poll in May showed him with a healthy edge...
...Williams has supported the National Endowment for the Arts, and Marlenee has labeled 38 The American Spectator October 1992 him "Porno Pat...
...Marlenee is hefty and gregarious, and jabs at his enemies—environmental activists, for example, whom he calls "posy-sniffing prairie-fairies...
...Due to the 1990 census, the state known as the Last, Best Place has lost one of its two congressional seats...
...The Last, Best Seat by Patrick Symmes T he Fourth of July rodeo in Livingston was serious business, with a sold-out crowd in their Saturday night best of broad Stetsons, Wranglers, and cowboy boots...
...The kid kept at it, and when he finally pinned the animal down into the mud, two thousand pairs of boots pounded the bleachers in appreciation...
Vol. 25 • October 1992 • No. 10
