Burns, Tester: Who will vote for you?

Election Day is just around the corner, and despite what you might hear from political pundits in New York and Washington, D.C., the Senate race in Montana is still up in the air.

You can imagine that a core group of voters will stick with incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns no matter what he says or does, and the same goes for his opponent, state Sen. Jon Tester. It mostly comes down to party affiliation, with few Republicans likely to vote for Tester and few Democrats likely to vote for Burns.

So the race will be decided in the middle, by voters who are more concerned with issues than with political parties, and that is the way it should be. Unfortunately, those issue-oriented voters probably feel like they are in the middle of a mud-wrestling match, as the two campaigns fling accusations back and forth.

Who can you trust in such a nasty debate? Probably no one.

Let's take two recent examples of how the campaigns can mislead voters about their opponents. Perhaps the most blatant misstatement of fact has come from the Tester campaign in the last two weeks with their claim that Sen. Burns supports a 23 percent national sales tax. It just isn't so, and everyone who has looked at the facts, knows it isn't so.

Burns did say he would consider the Fair Tax proposal as part of comprehensive tax reform, but he never said he agreed with it. Moreover, the Tester campaign doesn't explain to voters that the "sales tax" would replace the federal income tax.

The Associated Press, the Billings Gazette and other independent analysts have all concluded that Burns has never supported a national sales tax, yet as of this week Tester is still sending out press releases on the issue that are misleading if not downright false.

The Burns campaign has not been much better though. As the AP reported Monday, two recent campaign press releases had the following absurd headlines: "Jon Tester: I will raise your taxes 48 percent" and "Jon Tester wants to help North Korea launder money." Those kinds of blatantly untrue charges just make everyone sick of the political process and cheapen the election of whoever eventually scrambles to power.

But despite everyone's distaste for the mudslinging, it is also obvious that there is no way to control this kind of negative advertising and no way to escape it.

Our best advice, therefore, is to ignore it.

Just don't base your vote on what either campaign is saying about the other candidate. It is obvious that such statements can't be trusted, and what we need to do now is educate voters to tune out all of the false advertising and focus on what does matter - what each candidate says he or she will do if elected, and what their record shows.

This might put a little burden on the voters, but we think they can handle it. There is no doubt about the very real differences between Conrad Burns and Jon Tester, for instance, and those differences are what Montanans should base their vote on.

As one simple and straightforward example: If you oppose the Patriot Act, vote for Tester. If you favor the Patriot Act, vote for Burns.

The same kind of clear choice emerges on a number of issues such as how to vote for Supreme Court nominees, how to vote on illegal immigration, how to vote on repeal of the estate tax, and how to vote on extending the child tax credit.

Both of the candidates have strong opinions, and so do most voters. So forget about how many insults can be heaped on a particular candidate and vote for the person you think will vote most like you in the Senate.

That's what this whole process is about - representational government. Despite the loud voices we hear ever six years, the most important thing senators do is not run for re-election; it is voting in our name on issues great and small.

Give your vote to the candidate who you think will vote for you.