It’s campaign season.
The phrase strikes terror in the hearts of many. From now until the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, office seekers will fill the airwaves with ads intended to earn our vote.
There’s one not-so-small consolation for Montanans: quite often Treasure State candidates direct their sales pitch at hunters and anglers.
Even that can sometimes be painful. Who can forget the dueling efforts of Rob Quist and Greg Gianforte to prove which was the best television-set hunter during last year’s campaign to fill Montana’s vacant House seat?
Neither man is an avid hunter, but at least they consider hunters a constituency worth courting.
A “hot” hunting issue recently boiled to the surface in Montana’s U.S. Senate race. Incumbent Jon Tester likes to tout his support for hunters in his television ads, but a news story revealed he’s rarely possessed a hunting license in the last decade or so.
His opponent, Matt Rosendale, the story explained, has had a Montana hunting license every year since 2002.
What should we make of that? Not a whole lot, probably. While I consider active participation in hunting and angling an important attribute for, well, any human, I’m not sure it’s a deal breaker in the voting booth. What’s more important is where a candidate stands on issues such as the ownership of public lands, public access and the health of wildlife.
If I’ve got a deal breaker, it might be whether a candidate understands and supports the basic principles of the North American Model of Wildlife Management. Does the candidate understand management should be science based, and that science-based management is more costly and complicated than seat-of-the-pants-based management?
If they don’t, they probably won’t get my vote.
In any event, the timeframe covered by the story is the period when Tester represented Montana as a U.S. senator, a profession that lends itself to racking up frequent flyer miles, not time in the field.
I’m glad both Tester and Rosendale are interested in wooing people with “I’m a hunter and I vote” bumper stickers on their pickup trucks. Still, hunters and anglers ought to carefully consider the records of both men as they decide who deserves their vote.
I’ve seen plenty of gratuitous efforts to turn the heads of camo-clad voters over the years, but none were as blatant as John Kerry’s goose-hunting expedition just days before the 2004 presidential election. I doubt anyone who saw the footage of Kerry walking about with a dead goose thought, “Well, he must have been planning that trip for a long time. It’s not like he had anything more important to do three days before the biggest election of his life.”
The latest politician who may wish she’d kept her hunting habits out of the public glare is Judy Cochran, the 73-year-old mayor of Livingston, Texas. Livingston is in the southeastern part of the state, the part where alligators still roam.
A few years back one of those gators ate Cochran’s pet miniature horse. Last week she got her revenge when she acquired a legal permit and killed the offending reptile. Most folks would be sympathetic to her motives, especially, I suspect, many of Cochran’s neighbors who likely have their own alligator horror stories.
Unfortunately, someone posted a video of the hunt on social media, which attracted the attention of anti-hunters across the globe. A firestorm of criticism ensued and Cochran may wish whoever posted the clip had instead paraphrased Sin City’s tag line — What happens in Livingston stays in Livingston — and not pressed the post button.
The good news is that once the campaign season ends, we’ll still have plenty of hunting season ahead. There’s no better time to clear your head.
Rob Breeding is the editor of www.mthookandbullet.com, which covers outdoor news in Montana.