Posted on 07/18/2007 8:53:25 PM PDT by Montana Headlines
HELENA - Former state legislator Bob Keenan said Tuesday that he's evaluating a recruiting pitch from national Republicans urging him to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Max Baucus next year.
The Bigfork resident said he's asking Montanans if they think Baucus can be beat.
Keenan, 55, served 12 years in the Montana House and then the Senate, including two years as Senate president, before term limits ended his tenure after 2006. Keenan lost a 2006 primary challenge to U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, 72 percent to 22 percent, with minor candidates splitting the rest.
He said officials from the National Republican Senatorial Committee told him they ran a poll and found that he and U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg were the only two Republicans who could give Baucus "a run for his money." Rehberg is seeking re-election to the House.
(Excerpt) Read more at billingsgazette.net ...
So far, only State Rep. Mike Lange, who was GOP state House majority leader through the recent controversial legislative session, has declared for the GOP nomination.
Keenan is more of a known quantity in the state GOP, having made headlines by being the only credible primary challenger to Sen. Conrad Burns in the most recent election.
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Good! There is NO reason Baucus should be representing Montana in the senate; he votes with Ted Kennedy 90% of the time on important votes.
He lost by a 50 point margin. This doesn’t seem to reflect well on his electability.
Idk, a lot of Republicans may have felt more comfortable voting with Burns, being the Incumbent. The turnout for that primary wasn’t that great. If Keenan wants to run, let him, maybe we will get lucky, I don’t think Baucus is going down anyway.
LOL! For that, you just landed yourself on the Montana Headlines pinglist (at least until you ask off.) :-)
Baucus’s ACU rating is roughly 40% — pretty bad for a Republican, but it makes him one of the half-dozen most conservative-voting Democrats.
That says more about how Democrats vote, BTW, than it does about whether Baucus is conservative. He votes right just often enough on push-button issues to keep himself out of serious trouble.
His famous line when he is voting in a way that will make moveon.org or DailyKos or LeftInTheWest mad is that “the people of Montana are my boss.”
No, that reflects on the deep support that Burns had in the GOP base.
It also reflects the fact that even those who weren’t Burns fans felt that unless Conrad voluntarily stepped down, a bruising GOP primary would hurt the GOP chances in the fall.
No one really knows how much support Keenan will be able to garner under these conditions.
I just saw this reply — similar to my own to Clintonfatigued.
Baucus is a heavy favorite, but paradoxically, the Burns defeat makes him more vulnerable — certainly far more vulnerable than he was in 2002 when he was able to run ads of him being buddies with Bush over the income tax cuts.
After all, the key things against Burns were that he took money from Abramoff and that he’d been in Washington too long. Well, guess what Max has done.... The Dems practically wrote our campaign ads for us.
Keenan is also an experienced Montana politician, unlike Mike Taylor in 2002 — Taylor’s only qualification was that he was rich enough to put a lot of money into his own campaign.
Even if we can’t beat Baucus, it is important to make him work for it — otherwise he just pours his war chest into defeating our state and local GOP candidates.
I don’t know if Keenan or Lange or someone else will put up the best fight. We need to figure that out.
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