House District 4 race turns negative

To say the race for House District 4 this year has become mean-spirited and inflammatory may seem obvious to many, but there’s more to the story. Although their political beliefs are wide apart, both candidates say their opponent is hard-working and intelligent — and both blame people outside their campaigns for personal attack ads and campaign tricks that could be illegal.

Republican Derek Skees says he’s been a grassroots activist who helped other candidates for the past decade and sees the ascendancy of the Tea Party in 2010 as an historical turning point.

“I was in the Tea Party before it was cool,” he told the Pilot.

Democrat Will Hammer quist says he doesn’t believe a Tea Party candidate is best for the Whitefish community, but he respects his opponent.

“I believe Derek and I share a lot of values about hard-working families,”  he told the Pilot. “But our other views are very divergent.”

While both candidates want to debate the issues that matter to voters, their personal lives and personal beliefs have become targets for public attack. In Skees’ case, it started in June after he and his family wore jackets with Confederate flags on the back during the Memorial Day parade in Whitefish.

Skees explained his position in an e-mail that he says was widely distributed by Democratic Rep. Mike Jopek, who is not running for re-election in HD4. The jackets are for a Civil War re-enactment club, Skees said. He also explained his position on the “War of Secession,” which he said was “an unconstitutional war declared by Congress and President Lincoln” and involved “Yankee Trader greed and Southern honor.”

Revisionist historians with an agenda have convinced the public otherwise, Skees explained, but “the war was not fought over slavery but rather states rights.” He also pointed out that he “abhors all types of slavery” and is glad it has been abolished, but the loss of states rights was also a big blow to the country.

Hammerquist disagrees.

“I believe the war was fought over slavery,” he said.

States rights

Some HD4 voters may ask what a war 150 years ago has to do with today, and the answer is states rights. Skees believes now is the time for states to reclaim their rights, and legislatures should vote to “nullify” the Obama administration’s new healthcare act while a favorable 5-4 vote still exists in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Skees said that if the Montana Legislature “nullified” the healthcare act, he would tell his constituents that it no longer is in effect in Montana, and they wouldn’t be obligated to follow its rules. When asked about the legality of “nullification,” Skees said it’s important to push a 10th Amendment test case to the high court — and he would still tell his constituents that the healthcare act was not in effect in Montana.

“I strictly construct the Constitution,” he said. “It’s not a living, breathing document — it can only change through the amendment process.”

Hammerquist calls the “nullification” idea “nonsense.” He also expressed concern about Skees’ support for “citizen grand juries,” which could lead to “witch hunts on citizens.”

“’We the people’ are supreme,” Skees explains, noting that the proper order of authority in the U.S. should be county first, state second and federal government third.

If elected, Skees anticipates having trouble getting support for some of his ideas in the legislature.

“But you want to try — it has to be tried,” he said.

Attack ad

The campaign’s tone sharply changed after the Flathead Beacon ran an ad on Sept. 29 that said Skees represented “hate-based extremists.” Paid for by the North Valley PAC political action committee, the ad also showed the Confederate flag and a photo of Adolph Hitler.

Skees calls the ad “totally lies,” pointing out that his grandmother is Jewish and he was married by a black minister. He and his supporters have demanded that Hammerquist take responsibility for the ad.

Skees says Hammerquist offered to “write a letter or do something” minutes before an election forum in Whitefish started the day after the Beacon ad ran.

The North Valley PAC officers are directly linked to Hammerquist, Skees claims, including Joan Vetter Ehrenberg, a past Flathead County Democratic Party chairman, and Diane Grove, who Skees claims helped organize and pay for a Hammerquist fundraiser at the FischWorks office on Second Street.

At the conclusion of the Sept. 30 forum, Skees says, he told Hammerquist that if he didn’t write a letter apologizing for the ad, “you own it.”

Hammerquist acknowledges the PAC officers are his supporters, but he points out that he doesn’t “support or endorse these types of ads.” He also says he doesn’t accept money from PACs — he says he returned $1,000 to PACs so far — and  it’s “not my responsibility to explain Derek’s attitudes and beliefs.”

“North Valley PAC never told me what they were doing,” Hammerquist said. “It would be coordination, and that’s illegal.”

For his part, Skees acknowledges he attended the May 21-22 Liberty Convention at the University of Montana’s Adams Field House mentioned in the Beacon ad. While newspaper accounts back Skees’ claim that racist and anti-Semitic activities did not take place, some of the speakers have done so in the past.

Skees said he’d never heard of Billings tax-protestor Red Beckman, which the North Valley PAC ad called “a notorious anti-Semite.” Skees said he went to the convention to see Kitty Werthman, a Holocaust survivor from Austria, former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and Chuck Baldwin, a 2008 presidential candidate for the Constitution Party.

Some of the speakers at the Liberty Convention were “kooks,” Skees pointed out, including Schaeffer Cox, who claims he commands 3,500 members of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia, and who asked convention attendees if they would kill for freedom.

“The John Birchers would call him a ‘tangent,’” Skees said. “Someone who distracts from the real issues.”

Skees says the Democratic Party — and probably also the Republican Party — are trying to discredit the Tea Party movement across the U.S. by invoking racist and anti-Semite claims.

Push poll

The HD4 campaign took another turn last week when voters began to receive calls from people with foreign-sounding accents who claimed to be working for Hammerquist. The claim is false, Hammerquist says, so the calls are illegal. He said he’s trying to track down the source of the calls, which could be coming from New Hampshire or Colorado.

Hammerquist says the calls are a type of “push poll” in which someone is trying to connect him to President Obama and Democrats in Congress, especially the federal healthcare act, as a way to discredit him, He said he doesn’t expect Skees to apologize for the calls if he had nothing to do with them.

“I bet it’s the Democratic Party,” Skees said about the “push poll” calls, noting that similar campaign-linking is taking place across the country. “It has nothing to do with me. I would never do something like that. I’ve turned down people who wanted to run attack ads. Negative, hate-based advertising hurts the public process.”

Mean-spirited campaigning will drive people away from politics, either as voters or candidates, Skees said.

“It distracts us from the issues that are relevant to us,” he said.

By presstime, Hammer quist had sent an e-mail to Skees asking him to stop running a radio ad in which Skees claimed Hammerquist lives in Helena and not Whitefish.

Skees suggested in the ad that Hammerquist was a “carpetbagger” but was trying to pin the label on Skees, who lives in Kalispell.

Hammerquist responded by saying the investment property he owns in Helena is rented out long-term and that he is registered to vote in White fish, pays property taxes in Flathead County and has a Whitefish address on his driver’s license.

Skees told the Pilot on Wednesday that Hammer-quist had told him during the primary that he intended to move back to Helena if he won the election. Skees also said he’d pull the ad because it wasn’t worth all the controversy.