My take on the political campaigns is in this week's Outpost. I also sat down for an hour with Jon Tester this week for a freelance story I'm doing. I've met Tester a couple of times before, but this was my first extended interview with him. My reaction: a heck of a nice guy. If he has an artifical bone anywhere in him, I couldn't find it. The guy just sort of exudes decency. Even a stalwart conservative I interviewed who served in the Legislature with Tester, and who blasted just about everything Tester has done and hopes to do, agreed that he's a great guy.
But is that enough to win? I don't think so. And I still haven't gotten a good feeling about what Tester actually would do if he won. I'm guessing that lots of people feel the same way. On the other hand, I'm not sure what Conrad Burns would do either. His ads this week were nearly all on flag burning. I wrote about that in the June 29 Outpost (the link doesn't seem to be working right now).
What Burns doesn't even attempt to do in his flag-burning ads is try to make a case for amending the constitution, other than that he thinks he owes it to veterans. Just out of cussedness, I fired off an e-mail to his staff asking whether the senator thought the 1989 Supreme Court ruling on flag burning was wrong (Antonin Scalia voted with the majority) or whether it was the founding fathers who screwed up. I don't expect an answer.
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If you do get a response, it'll probably be like the one I got when I wrote him about his immigration ads. He couldn't respond because I sent my comment to him at his D.C. address and he's not allowed to respond to "political" ads there. I say BS.
"And I still haven't gotten a good feeling about what Tester actually would do if he won"
Here is an educated guess. He'd vote more or less in lockstep with Edward Kennedy and Barbara Boxer. Probably not very reflective of the average citizen of Montana.
Was Scalia wrong? You bet. Flag burning fell and should continue to fall under the fighting words doctrine. Bob Bork makes a good case for why Scalia is wrong. Thomas Sowell makes a good layman's case.
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