I sat in on Dan Testa’s interview with Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg over the weekend, and one thing that struck me was the Republican congressman’s candor when asked about Montana Sen. Max Baucus’ television ads defending his healthcare vote. Testa touched on it a bit in his story, but I asked him for transcripts of the interview where Rehberg talked about the potential local fallout to Baucus’ and fellow Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s vote in favor of the legislation. As you can see, Rehberg doesn’t exactly pull any punches:
A leader that quits listening probably isn’t going to be around very long. That’s why I find it a little ironic that Max is running ads already. Have you seen them? His campaign is already running 60-second TV and radio ads defending himself. Does that tell you something? It tells you that he did something contrary to the desires or the beliefs or the philosophy of Montana and he doesn’t want to pay the price five years from now. That’s interesting. I’ve never seen anything like that. Could you name another person who, five years before their reelection effort has had to advertise?
Who this ought to scare is Tester. Because if Max voted for the health care and he feels compelled to use part of his largesse to be advertising for 2014, and poor old Jon probably doesn’t have the money right now and doesn’t want to spend the money, he took exactly the same position, how is he going to … is he going to hope that whatever Max says convinces enough Montanans that they’ll forget that he voted for it, or what? I don’t know, it’s an interesting dynamic.
Baucus is up for reelection in 2014. If you haven’t seen his health care ad, here it is: