Politicians and horse pucky

Are politicians familiar with horse manure? Or… are they full of — it?

Greg Gianforte, the tech billionaire who lost the 2016 Montana gubernatorial race  in a year that otherwise went well for the GOP, is well on his way to becoming a perpetual candidate as the Republican nominee for the May 25th special election to fill Ryan Zinke’s seat in Congress.  Sadly, like Zinke, Gianforte seems to think that he can put on a pseudo-western persona to win Montana votes.  So here is my plea to politicians: please do not fake it; most of us know the difference.

Here’s the Gianforte installment:  Following a 2016 Gianforte TV ad, the Montana AFL-CIO created the following image, comparing Gianforte’s clean new farm cleanup togs to those of Senator Jon Tester, who is from Big Sandy, Montana, photographed in his obviously-real work clothes.

Gianforte, originally from Pennsylvania by way of New Jersey, is posing in a horse corral with a shovel, implying, apparently, that he was going to clean up  . . . something.  Aside from the clean white shirt, there was one other problem: he didn’t have the right tool for the job. Gianforte was holding a small scoop shovel, usually used for heavy, loose material such as gravel — useless for horse manure.¹  Once again, a politician—or his PR team— waded into a subject where they . . . well . . . don’t know their equine excrement.

Under normal circumstances, this story would have ended with Gianforte’s loss last November.  Except he’s ba-a-a-ck, this time challenging Rob Quist.  Quist is a Cut Bank native and  University of Montana alum who lives up the Flathead, famous as a member of Montana’s iconic Mission Mountain Wood Band.

So Gianforte is running TV ads to portray Quist, a liberal Democrat, as “out of touch” with Montana. This while “Jersey G” has no idea how clean up horse manure.  Of course, as a tech billionaire, he probably hasn’t had to clean up his own messes for a long time.  I’ll let the pundits debate political issues—I’m going to discuss the real stuff.

This, Greg, is horse manure:

A pile of horse manure on straw, about 36-48 hours old

Here are tools to pick it up.  These are called “manure forks”:

Plastic manure fork (left) and steel manure fork (right)

And here is how they work:

 

Ordinary piles of poop

Big, wet piles of poop

I wish the political mess in Washington could be cleaned up in as straightforward a fashion as a messy pile of horse manure.  But, just like some manure-cleaning jobs, many political messes are just too big for hand tools.  When you are greeted with a lot of horse manure, there is only one real solution: Get out the skidsteer (horse people really like skidsteers).

It might take even more work to dig through the morass in Washington, but the place to start is at the ballot box, starting with Montana’s May 25th special election:  Pick Quist.

Manure and barn cleaning

The moral of this story is simple: Vote for the candidate who knows how to clean up a mess, avoid the one who doesn’t.  When it comes to phony political ads claiming a candidate knows horse pucky when he sees it, well, call him on his, um, crap.  That goes double when a candidate tries to duck his own positions on the issues and uses proxies to blow dog whistles and take cheap shots at his opponent.

Gianforte needs to be told that he fools no one and that he can’t buy an election.

I guess we can at least be grateful Gianforte didn’t try to ride horses. Here he is last year riding some sort of cross between a jackalope and a mechanical bull. He’s curling into the fetal position; perhaps a typical response for someone who has never ridden anything except other politicos’ coattails.

Notes:
1. For those who care about the technical details of rural life, a square scoop shovel is good for loose material that is not stuck to the ground. Manure is sticky and often mixed with straw, shavings, or other bedding material, so a square shovel can’t get under it very easily—if at all. The shovel Gianforte was holding was also too small to pick up a pile of manure. For removing manure and soiled bedding from a non-porous surface, some folk  use a much larger aluminum shovel designed to move lighter weight material, like this one:

aluminum scoop shovel suitable for handling loose material such as sawdust

Copyright 2017, Brenda Wahler