(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Cascade County has become a perfect example of our national politics – Daily Montanan [1] ['More From Author', 'December', 'Darrell Ehrlick'] Date: 2023-12-21 If 2023 showed us anything, it’s: If it ain’t fixed, break it. In a time where competency and civility look quaint and bygone, the rot that seems to plague national politics has taken root deeply into local politics. It used to be that we’d approach the reruns of the Clinton family versus the Bush family with a degree of weary resignation: Not great choices, but who’d really want their lives put under a national microscope? It made a certain degree of sense that some of the brightest and most competent were smart enough to want no part of that noise. Yet that same mistrust of politics and politicians has created a toxic mindset that has seeped to the deepest level of government, and we can look to local libraries and some of the least glamorous of government jobs to understand just how deeply it’s penetrated. Take, for example, the circus in Cascade County. In the past decade, the elections administrator and clerk position has been transformed from a ministerial role, largely a bureau of bureaucrats in which few residents could even recount the daily job duties of the department, to a den of conspiracies about stolen elections and fake ballots. Good lord, the truth is so much less sexy. Montana has become a microcosm of the localization of national politics. Cascade County faces lawsuits and questions of competency about its Republican-led clerk and recorder, who, until very recently, was in charge of elections. The all-Republican commissioners were in a no-win position: Leave a flailing clerk who was clearly in over her head to face one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime, or try to fix the problem in enough time to stabilize the system and try to shore up lagging confidence. The commissioners’ reward for trying to solve the problems has been a litany of accusations and political threats of payback, which may lead to their ouster. Republicans warring against other Republicans. The contours of the debate over whether to keep Clerk Sandra Merchant overseeing election duties shows just how deeply the radical rhetoric has been driven to the local level. “You can’t find employees because the population is decreasing – through people not having kids, having abortions, we’ve got folks that are retiring,” Rep. Steven Galloway, R-Great Falls, said during a recent public meeting. I am not sure which is more insulting: That Galloway believes abortion is causing a general labor shortage or the not-so-subtle implication that Merchant was the best residents could find because, you know, abortion somehow has taken the brightest, too. Our political rhetoric has become so tangled that busted elections are due to abortion. An elections office staff member saw Galloway’s crazy and upped the ante by accusing the commissioners of engaging in communism by stripping Merchant’s duties. The boogeyman of communism is now interchangeable with socialism or Marxism, even though those particular ideologies have distinct differences which history has often measured in human lives. More to the Montana point, if the commission’s actions were evidence of communism, the government would have just named a new head of elections instead of doing it by a process in public. And though it may prove to be unpopular, Montana law that stretches back more than 40 years gives the Cascade commissioners the power to separate the clerk from elections administration. Sounds more like a democratic disagreement, even if removing someone in the middle of her term indeed raises questions of equity and fairness. The sort of supercharged conspiracies and gridlock have crept so thoroughly into our body politic that even the qualifications for librarians are controversial. Recently, the state library commission voted to relax the academic qualifications for library leaders. One of the main groups that opposed such a measure was the librarians themselves. As a state making its way in an era of supercomputing and information superhighways, we’ve decided to dumb down the requirements. The Gianforte administration seemed to coordinate this effort, and you may remember that’s the same administration that talks so much about equipping Montana communities for the future and making them more competitive. Because nothing will make us more competitive like settling for less. These recent actions seem to be a reminder that while our leaders are political, not everything in government should be. Having covered governments of all sizes and functions since the Clinton-era, I learned quickly that government is hardly as conspiratorial as anyone thinks. Don’t let talk of “red-tape reduction” fool you. That’s becoming code for breaking that which was never broken. And if we’re trying to make Montana look more like the “business world,” we’ve succeeded by creating call centers with interminable wait times, and state government that has doled out tax breaks for large corporations. To me, it just sounds likes like we’re fine becoming Montana mediocre. 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