So Kelleher finally won a race: Now what?
U.S. Senate candidate, who's for a parliament and socialized medicine, isn't claimed by GOP
By JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau
HELENA - Republican U.S. Senate nominee Bob Kelleher wants a "nonviolent revolution" to overthrow the foundation of American government. He favors enormous, FDR-style government work programs to reduce poverty; he wants to nationalize the American oil and gas industries and supports government-run, socialized medicine. He has little nice to say about President Bush or former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot.
Political scientists and the head of the Montana Republican Party say Kelleher, 85, isn't really a Republican at all.
And yet Kelleher beat five mostly conservative to moderate GOP candidates to become the Republican who will take on Democrat Sen. Max Baucus in the fall.
How did this happen? And what does it mean?
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But almost none of that sounds like the stuff of a Republican, said Craig Wilson, a political science professor at Montana State University Billings.
"Absolutely, positively not," Wilson said when asked if Kelleher, who has run mostly as a Democrat, with a few Green Party races thrown in, could now be considered a Republican.
Erik Iverson, chairman of the Montana Republican Party and Republican U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg's chief of staff, agreed.
"No. Those positions don't reflect the platform of the Montana Republican Party or the national Republican Party," he said. "Mr. Kelleher is going to have to go out and make his case to Republicans and all Montana."
So why did 26,765 Republicans vote for him Tuesday? Kelleher didn't just squeak out a win. He got almost 10,000 more votes than his closet competitor, Mike Lange, the GOP House majority leader in the 2007 session and a man whose Republican identity is hardly in question.
"I don't know," Wilson said Tuesday with a laugh.
But there are many theories.
First, Wilson said, the vote in the GOP Senate primary was split among six candidates, none of whom had raised much money or done much campaigning to get their names out. The one possible exception, Wilson said, was Lange, who gained fame - or at least infamy - at the end of the 2007 Legislature, when he let loose a mouthful of profanities that were widely seen on television and computer screens. Lange also participated in the conciliatory, bipartisan meeting with Democrats that brought an end to the stalemate over the state budget.
That got him removed from his leadership position.
Many Republicans who voted in the race knew nothing about the candidates, or they knew only that they didn't want to vote for Lange.
There's also the matter of the paltry Republican turnout, Wilson said. Almost two-thirds of the ballots cast Tuesday were for Democrats, a startling turnaround.
So you've got a small number of Republicans splitting their vote among a large selection of political nobodies - and one guy with a spotty record.
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That mainstream Republicans couldn't field a candidate able to dominate the race also says something else, they say.
It means that Baucus, who amassed $10 million in his war chest, successfully scared off any credible GOP challenger, Lopach said. And it means the GOP might be in some trouble if it couldn't rustle up somebody able to knock off an eccentric like Kelleher, to say nothing of giving Baucus a real run for his voluminous money.
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2008/06/05/news/state/18-primary08_s.txt