Gianforte’s attack on reporter was an assault on all of us
Jacquielynn Floyd says if you asked your elected official a tough policy question would you expect an answer, or a bloody nose?
Tell me this: Do the politicians you elect to represent you owe you an explanation for the decisions they make, the votes they cast? Are they accountable for the policy decisions that affect your life?
If you think so, you have been assaulted.
You were assaulted Wednesday, when a Montana congressional candidate physically attacked a reporter who had the temerity, the gross effrontery, to ask him a question.
According to witnesses, Greg Gianforte, a conservative software billionaire campaigning in a special election, did not take kindly to a journalist for the British-based Guardian asking about the GOP-sponsored health care plan.
The reporter, Ben Jacobs, was seeking response about new, nonpartisan estimates that the House-approved proposal could leave millions more Americans uninsured.
In short, Jacobs was doing his job. Americans everywhere, at all points of the political spectrum, want to know where current and potential elected officials stand on this critical and contentious issue.
Gianforte at first tried to deflect the question. When Jacobs persisted, Gianforte — based on audio recordings of the incident — went full-tilt bonkers, shouting, “Get the hell out of here!”
Eyewitnesses from a Denverbased Fox network news crew say at the same time, Gianforte seized Jacobs and body-slammed him to the floor.
“Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him,” wrote Fox reporter Alicia Acuna in a first-person account. She and her crew, she added, “watched in disbelief as Gianforte then began punching the reporter.”
Jacobs, shaken and with his glasses broken, was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but appeared to have been generally unharmed. Gianforte was charged, according to the local sheriff (who, incidentally, donated to Gianforte’s campaign), with misdemeanor assault.
Gianforte’s staff, in a spectacular effort to rewrite the narrative, blamed the imbroglio on “aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist.”
Ol’ Greg, they intimated, good ol’ Greg, was just trying to shield his poor beleaguered self from “badgering questions.”
Naturally, a great many folks who buy into the popular Trumpian view of “liberal” journalists as enemies-of-the-people view this incident as a theatrical instance of frontier justice: Brave outsider politician gives an insufferable elitist the bum’s rush! As one comment-section wit asked, “Where do I send bail money?” Har-har!
Let us return to reality, however, and realize what happened here. A question — a reasonable and relevant question — was answered with unprovoked violence.
If you went down to City Hall and asked your elected representative whether he or she favors lowering your taxes, or building a new library, or fixing the sidewalk in front of your house, which would you expect: An answer, or a bloody nose?
Should you write your congressperson a letter asking about — I dunno, farm subsidies or EPA regulations — and he or she doesn’t like the question, is it OK for goons to come to your house and rough you up a little? Wouldn’t that teach you to keep your mouth shut?
Whether this shameful episode will have much effect on voters remained to be seen on Thursday, the day of the election. By the time it happened, early votes had already been cast.
As is too often the case, Montana voters had none-too-impressive choices in this election, which was called to fill the seat vacated in March when former Rep. Ryan Zinke was confirmed as U.S. interior secretary. The sparsely populated state holds only one at-large seat in the U.S. House.
Gianforte, a failed gubernatorial candidate with no political experience, champions various Christian-right causes, notably “Young-Earth” creationism. He’s the chief donor behind a roadside museum in Glendive, Mont., that claims, among other things, that dinosaurs rode aboard Noah’s ark and that our planet and all life on it were minted wholesale about 6,000 years ago.
His opponent, Rob Quist, a genial, cowboy-hat-wearing professional folk singer with no political experience, seemed at a loss for a response when asked for his reaction to Gianforte’s attack on a reporter. (TIP: “Physical assault is unacceptable” might have been a pretty safe, middle-of-the-road response.)
Well, the bar is set pretty low for electoral office these days, since the less experience a candidate has in actually crafting policy, the better everybody seems to like him-or-her.
Here’s one thing that has remained constant, however: Every elected official’s job description involves answering questions. Dealing with journalists is part of the bargain.
Refusing to engage, dodging hard questions, hiding from the media are tactics employed by demagogues and gimcrack dictators. Using violence to quiet journalists, however, is something else, something more frightening.
This is not to say Gianforte is a totalitarian monster. It’s only to say that he does not respect the basic rights of reporters or anybody else to ask questions. He believes he has no obligation to respond to them.
This is what made him lose his temper.
In losing his temper, he revealed his contempt for you, for me, for people who take it for granted that our elected officials owe us their attention and their answers.
He revealed that he needs to find a different line of work. Greg Gianforte is not fit to hold public office in a democracy.