Gov. Bullock lurches leftward on way to Iowa

Montana’s two-term Democratic governor will be looking for a new job in 2020, and Steve Bullock may have signaled last week that he envisions a future where the Mexican border will be more important to him than the Canadian border.

Yep, Gov. Bullock appears to have his eyes on the prize of the presidency. There’s been speculation for some time that Bullock thinks his blue victories in a purple (leaning red) state qualify him to be the anti-Trump who can attract politically disgusted independents while not driving away hard lib voters who think Trump is the anti-Christ.

Bullock’s already started a national political action committee called the Big Sky Values PAC. In April, he also visited Iowa, the caucus state where outsider candidacies are made or broken before the big-money candidates bigfoot their way to victory.

“Being a western governor in a state that Donald Trump won by 20 points, yet being able to get progressive things done, I have an important voice for the party and it is an important voice as we go toward 2020,” Bullock told Radio Iowa during that visit.

But what cements the deal for me on Gov. Bullock’s intentions is the letter he wrote last week to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee complaining about plans for the U.S. Census Bureau to ask about citizenship on the 2020 form.

Perish the thought! Why, how could our U.S. government have any interest in knowing how many U.S. citizens are living in our country — and just as importantly, how many noncitizens are here, sharing our wealth, jobs, schools and government benefits!

This is the kind of absurd sophistry that makes Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” essential reading for anyone who has a well-developed sense of irony.

But even worse that the Democratic penchant for pretending that everything is equal to everything else (citizens are the same as noncitizens, girls are the same as boys, illegal is the same as legal) is their insistence for turning every policy or question they don’t like into some kind of ism — sexism, racism, birtherism.

This Gov. Bullock complained to Reps. Trey Gowdy and Elijah Cummings that the citizenship question violated the “public trust.” He claims that knowing how many citizens live in our country would somehow “distort the results of the Census.” In a heartfelt pitch to the Democratic base, he complained “There is no place for the ugly, racial history of gerrymandering to rear its head again through the Census.”

Somehow, Bullock has concluded that asking a question that was included in the Census until 1950 is un-American and “disproportionately targets underrepresented communities, citizens and noncitizens alike.”

I suppose you need the Democratic rhetoric decoder ring to be able to find out just how the question “targets” anyone. I admit I don’t get it. Nor do I understand how the citizenship question would “threaten to dilute the voices of American Indians, Hispanics, Asian Americans, African Americans, and others in our democratic system of government.” This is, of course, completely backwards from reality. If they are Americans, then separating out noncitizens will actually strengthen their voice. And by mixing in noncitizens with citizens, you are in fact “diluting” the voice and the power of all Americans.

The audience for this letter, of course, wasn’t the two congressmen who received it, nor was it the Montanans who elected Gov. Bullock or those whom he serves as governor. The intended audience is the left-wing donors who will wield ultimate power over the the 2020 Democratic presidential selection process, and the extreme left voters in Iowa who control the caucuses in that state.

I expect that this is not the last bit of catering to left-wing agenda that we will see from our supposedly purple governor. If he wants to win the Democratic nomination, he needs to do it.

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. He can be reached by email at fmiele@dailyinterlake.com