| Roy Brown should probably not be calling Kendall Van Dyk silly nicknames, given his vulnerability on a certain embarrassing issue that arose in his 2008 run against Schweitzer that could lead to a few nicknames of his own, such as Olive Oil Roy or Broccoli Brown.
When we talk about "Red Meat" in politics, the expression refers to a politician's support for an issue that his ravenous partisan voters crave: "red meat for the base" is an expression you might hear used to describe Denny Rehberg making a pro-Pharma vote, or Schweitzer supporting universal healthcare.
But in Roy Brown's case, the red meat is anything but red meat. It's tempting to dismiss the "Brown is a Vegetarian" press from 2008 as a bunch of silliness, but behind the silliness there is an interesting political question as to whether ranchers, and those who make money in the ranching economy, would base their votes on whether a candidate eats meat or not. Roy got less than a third of the vote against Schweitzer. Did the story about him being a vegetarian (or is he vegan?) have any effect on the outcome of the race, because it hindered his ability to shore up his base vote. The GOP base is a meat-eating lot, and one of the stereotypes Republicans love to play up is the image of Democrats as hippy, vegan, fruit-and-nut-eating liberal voters from Missoula. So when a conservative standard-bearer has to fight to clear his name of the outrageous, unthinkable assertion that he is a vegetarian, it's likely that you haven't heard the end of it.
To recap what happened, Montanans awoke in the fall of 2008 to one of the most amusing declarations in Montana political history: Brown: "I am not, nor have I ever been, a vegetarian", Brown in a Billings Gazette article said it was an outrageous lie.
A neighbor of the Browns said she was invited to their house for dinner and was informed that Brown and his wife were vegetarians. She wrote an email to a few ranchers asking if they would oppose a candidate on such grounds, the email got around, and Brown sent out a press release strenuously denying the outrageous rumor.
Or sort of.
He said he "was not, nor had he ever been" a vegetarian. But then he said that he had been a vegetarian, but only for a year and as a show of support for an ill family member who couldn't eat meat. Then, in a little-noticed paragraph of a profile-piece on Brown a few weeks after that, a family member was quoted as saying that he is practically "a vegetarian." The link has expired but I've posted the story in the comments so you can see the source. And then there was the pathetic photo Roy posted of himself, on his campaign website, sitting in front of a big plate of steak. Publicitiy stunts are certainly not Roy's thing.
Stay tuned to the Billings senate race, to see if beef is what's for dinner in the Van Dyk/Brown face-off. |
