The Blue Man Who Threw the Montana Race to Tester
News: In Big Sky country, a libertarian with a very puzzling medical history did just enough to give the Senate race to the Democrats.
November 10, 2006
|
|
As we noted on election night with some sense of déjà vu, green and libertarian candidates wreaked terror on the major parties this year. In Virginia, independent green Gail Parker barely left Jim Webb with enough liberal scraps to make a Democratic victory banner in the Senate -- but over at the GOP, Karl Rove is finally feeling the third-party blues. Rove’s woe has been triggered by a Smurf-like (more on this shortly) libertarian, Stan Jones, who helped bring down the mighty Conrad Burns in Montana by snatching three percent of the don’t-tread-on-me vote, quite likely tipping the race to Democratic challenger Jon Tester. The Republicans have thus far accepted this likelihood with noble restraint. Jones told me no angry red staters have called to harass him, and I couldn’t find a single complaint about his race on conservative blogs. It could be Republicans are too shell shocked to notice. Or, to their credit, too preoccupied with soul searching.
That Jones could be the man who indirectly turned Montana, and thus the whole Senate, blue, is oddly poetic given that Jones is himself blue. By this I don’t mean he’s sad, louche, or a libertarian with Democratic sympathies (though the lattermost is also true), but that Stan Jones is blue. A few bloggers know the story: In the days leading up to the dawn of the new millennium, Jones believed the Y2K virus could cause the collapse of Western Civilization. To steel his immune system against a post-apocalypse wracked by pandemics, he began drinking a solution of ionic silver, which he believed was a more powerful armor than vitamin C. "The pioneers that crossed the plains of America used to put a silver dollar in the bottom of a bucket of milk to keep it fresh longer," he explained when I reached him at his house in Bozeman. "So anyway, I studied it, and I thought it would be a good preventative, so I just started taking it all the time. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure out the whole story." He didn’t realize the silver ions would bind with minerals in the Montana tap water and lodge in his cells. "The silver is nontoxic; it doesn’t affect my health in any way," he said, "but I am a little blue-grey."
Not all the time, it should be noted. But most definitely under fluorescent bulbs in Rotary clubs and rec centers.
Jones' blueness occasionally goes more than skin deep. He sides with liberals against the War on Drugs, political action committees, and the Patriot Act, which he dubs "a major, major freedom eliminator." Jones thinks Tester’s stance against the Patriot Act gives him a slight edge over Burns, who "wouldn’t know what an individual right was if it came up and bit him on the knee." Nonetheless, Jones chided both candidates for focusing on popular issues like healthcare and energy. "That's all appeal to the voters," he scoffed. His website includes position papers chocked full ideas for thumbing our collective nose at the government, among them, paying back tobacco companies for all their lost lawsuits: "Smoking does not increase government's expense of providing health care," he wrote, "it actually decreases it because smokers die much earlier."
Jones won even more votes in his 2002 Senate race -- a solid four percent of them (perhaps not coincidentally, he was a touch more blue at the time). He attributes this year's weaker showing to people being duped by "the big party theme that to vote for a third party is wasting your vote." Of course, the Democrats running the Senate might see it differently, as does Jones, who is of the mind that a vote for him was a vote for principle. I asked Jones if his allure might have also been wrapped up with his blueness. "I think it’s a wash," he told me. "People don't treat me any differently than anyone else. I mean, Bozeman's not a big town, and people that come around, they’re used to me."
Josh Harkinson is an Investigative Fellow at Mother Jones.
