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, two days ago, Kelleher beat five other, mostly conservative to mainstream GOP candidates to become the Republican who will take on Sen. Max Baucus in the fall. He won fair and square.
How did this happen? And what does it mean?
"Honest to goodness, I see the hand of the Almighty in this," Kelleher said Wednesday reached by telephone at his Butte law office.
For the last 44 years, Kelleher has run for office sixteen times and lost fifteen. His only taste of victory came in 1971, when he was elected a delegate to Montana's Constitutional Convention. There, he helped replace the state's century-old territorial constitution with one of the most progressive governing documents in the nation. Kelleher's political passion then, as now, is unique — and largely unpopular: He wants to replace the U.S. Senate, House and presidency with a parliament.
Under a parliamentary system, citizens vote for parties, not individual candidates. The party with the most votes selects a prime minister, who serves as a kind of president, from the ranks of the legislative branch. Under a parliament, Kelleher said Wednesday, you can't have a president of one party playing the blame game with a Congress controlled by the opposing party while the nation's real problems and real people wait endlessly for real solutions.
"There's no more passing the buck," he said. "The party in power is responsible for everything that goes wrong, as well as everything that goes right. Now, nobody is responsible, really."
Such broad representation would free America to deal with the problems that have literally been known to bring tears to Kelleher's eyes: He is passionate about eradicating poverty. He believes health care is a right of all citizens and the government should pay for it with tax dollars. He believes bad trade policies have shipped American jobs overseas, while bad tax policy has created a startling dichotomy between rich and poor that threatens democracy itself. He believes government exists to serve the common good, not necessarily private interests, and that taxation, if spent wisely, is a solution to America's problems, not the cause.
Kelleher said he intends to campaign on those very issues, along with his long-held pro-life stance, in the general election against Baucus.
Fine. 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 mostly run 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 Montana 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 — in the end days of the 2007 Legislature. That's when he let loose a mouthful of obscenities broadcast on television around the state. Lange also participated in the conciliatory, bipartisan meeting with Democrats that brought an end to the stalemate over the state budget.
That little stunt got him removed from his leadership position.
So many Republicans who voted in the race either 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 amongst a large selection of political nobodies — and one guy with a spotty record.
There's also the matter of Ron Paul, a Republican/Libertarian presidential maverick who got 22 percent of the Montana vote. Some of those Kelleher votes could have come from Paul supporters registering their general disapproval of the party, Wilson said.
What about the Irish name hypothesis? Is there something to the idea that Kelleher is a nice Irish name and Montanans are comfortable with a person with Irish heritage in politics?
Maybe, Wilson said. Maybe not.
"Bill Kennedy has tried it several times down here," he said, referring to the Yellowstone County commissioner. "He's even got little green signs and a shamrock and it didn't work."
Both Wilson and Jim Lopach, a political science professor at the University of Montana, say the surprising victory likely boils down to name identification: Kelleher has run a lot. Voters see his name over and over. And when they are faced with a slate of names they don't know, they gravitate toward the one that sounds familiar.
"The name just has a ring to it," Lopach said. "You remember those names. They seem to call you out a bit."
Both men also agree on something else: The surprise victory does not mean Montana Republicans want to shelve American democracy and replace it with a parliament.
"I teach (political science) 101," Wilson said. "I know the vast majority of Montanans have no idea how a parliamentary system operates. They don't want to change their form of government. Ain't gonna happen."
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 funding, 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.
Baucus said Monday he's going to concentrate on taking his message directly to Montanans.
"I'm not running against anyone," Baucus said, reached by telephone in Washington, D.C., where the Senate was in session. "I'm just running for this job. I feel so lucky to be representing Montana."
Still, Kelleher's unusual candidacy does present some changes for both Baucus and Montana Republicans.
For one thing, said Barrett Kaiser, a Baucus spokesman, there will be no debates.
"Max plans on talking to Montanans across the state and they'll have ample opportunity to ask him questions," he said. "But we don't want to subject him to what will become a circus."
Iverson said the state party does not view the Kelleher-Baucus match-up a high priority. Kelleher, who is hardly even a Republican cannot possibly beat Baucus, Iverson said. The party is going to deploy its resources where it can win: on state Sen. Roy Brown's bid to pick off Gov. Brian Schweitzer and on Tim Fox's bid to win the open attorney general's seat.
But Iverson does not dismiss Kelleher.
As the party's U.S. Senate nominee, he will have a vote at the upcoming party convention in Missoula this month. Kelleher will have space to set out his material; he'll be able to make proposals and vote on the party platform.
Iverson said he didn't see a wellspring of support for a parliament or nationalizing major industries or other tenants of Kelleher's political philosophy. But he's entitled to his voice, Iverson said.
"I'm happy to have him in the mix," he said. "The Republican party is a big enough tent to have a lot of different points of view."
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