On Steve Bullock, the most rural of the candidates for Democratic nominee for POTUS?

I loved reading this op-ed by Sarah Vowell in the New York Times a few days ago, in part because I like Steve Bullock--and I love Montana--and in part because Vowell's writing is so much fun to read.  Part of her wit is invoking rural characters, like the Republican state senator described below who participated in the state Council on how to comply with federal Clean Power Plan.

Vowell presumably knows that of which she writes because she is from Montana.  The headline is, "This guy got Republicans to vote for a Democrat," and a few of my favorite sentences from the column follow (admitting at the outset that I'm a sucker for folksy, most of the time):

Introducing himself as the new governor in 2013, Mr. Bullock said, “My name is Steve, and I work for the state.” That is not the voice of a Democrat who wants to do away with the private health insurance of more than half the population. It is the voice of a Democrat who would go on to expand Medicaid coverage — twice — in a blood red state with a Republican majority legislature, a Democrat committed to keeping rural hospitals open, which probably only matters to people who don’t plan their heart attacks two hours ahead.

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When he goes out stumping for one of his squishy liberal plots to get fewer people killed, he tends to choose words that won’t make wheat farmers barf. Why, no, old coot in a feed store cap from Roundup, he’s not going to expand Medicaid, he’s going to “bring our taxpayer dollars home.”

* * *

His council on how Montana was going to comply with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan included a never-boring, ex-miner Republican state senator you definitely want pissing from the tent, the Montana Wildlife Federation, the Farmers Union, energy company executives, a couple of Democrats from the Environmental Quality Council, the chairman of the Crow tribe and for all I know the ghost of Norman Maclean.

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On the off chance there’s a question [in the debate] about the nuts and bolts of actual governance, I wonder how the governor could explain, in under 60 seconds, the coalitions of strange bedfellows he conjures to solve problems in a state with seven sovereign Indian nations that’s crammed into a single ridiculous congressional district the size of Japan.

Now that's sparsely populated.  Oddly, Bullock was not among the three candidates who actually uttered the word "rural" during the debate.  Those were Delaney, Sanders and Klobuchar, as discussed here.

But my personal favorite line from Vowell's column:

I swear Steve Bullock spends half his workday just sitting around listening.

Seems like that's been a winning strategy; perhaps more politicians should try it.

In other Bullock news, Maggie Astor brings us this brief profile, of sorts, in the New York Times.

Mr. Bullock has made money in politics the centerpiece of his campaign: It’s so central, in fact, that where other candidates have an “issues” or “policies” link, his website says, “One Big Idea.”

And here's a post-debate piece from CNN's John Avlon on the candidate, "Bullock offered a way of out partisan divides."

Bullock spoke with credibility as the only presidential candidate to have won in a state that Donald Trump carried by 20-points. 

He’s an easy target for the Twitterati to dismiss as a red-stater out of step with the party’s progressive wave. But with an opening statement that slammed “wish-list economics,” Bullock represents an almost forgotten tradition that scrambles the divisions that have come to define our times: he’s a western progressive, someone who has taken on big-money special interests while defending farmers and rural families who just "want a fair shot.”                                                            

He’s a gun owner and hunter who briefly silenced the audience by making the gun violence epidemic personal, citing the death of his 11-year old nephew on a school playground.

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He talked about the reality of climate change by pointing out that the fire season is now 80 days longer.

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So much of the partisan debates of the day are not actually red state versus blue state, but urban versus rural. A two-term red state Democratic governor offers a way out of those divides.

And while we're on the subject of Montana, here's a WaPo piece by Ben Terris from May 2017, "Jon Tester could teach Democrats a lot about rural America--if he can keep his seat."  It's a great story.  Here's a brief excerpt:

You’ve gotta be folksy if you want to win in Montana as a Democrat. But the truth is that Tester is as much a member of the Beltway elite as any other senator. He just happens to know how to use a tractor for more than a photo op.