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Republican duo reshapes Montana politics in Trump’s style – 570 News

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BOZEMAN, Mont. — Steve Daines is the affable one, the smiler, a consummate salesman who parlayed his corporate success into a meteoric rise through Montana politics and a seat in the U.S. Senate.

His former boss, Greg Gianforte, is more brusque, sometimes even harsh, a self-made technology mogul whose political career has proved rockier and included a stinging defeat for governor and unwanted notoriety when he assaulted a reporter during a successful run for U.S. House.

Together they form a powerful political alliance on the cusp of dominating Montana politics for years to come, pushing the state’s Republican Party away from a Western brand of centrism and toward the hard-line partisan agenda of President Donald Trump.

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Daines, 58, is seeking a second six-year term while Gianforte, 59, is pouring millions of dollars from his private fortune into another run at the governor’s mansion.

Dual victories would mark the latest achievement for men who first bonded on family camping trips in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains more than two decades ago. They worked in tandem to attain huge riches in the corporate world before leveraging that success into a political juggernaut that has reshaped the state’s Republican Party.

It’s a shift Montana Democrats argue is out of step with the state’s independent-minded electorate. Democrats have their own power duo hoping to hold the line in November: Gov. Steve Bullock, challenging Daines, is one of the Democrats’ best hopes to tilt the balance of power in the closely divided Senate. His lieutenant governor for the past five years, Mike Cooney, faces Gianforte.

But Democrats are handicapped by Gianforte’s willingness to spend his own money on the race — $3.5 million so far, after spending more than $6 million in 2016 — and a strong push for both by Trump, who carried Montana by 20 percentage points in 2016.

Daines has long benefited from his ties to Gianforte, who hired Daines into his Bozeman-based software firm, RightNow Technologies, that was later sold to Oracle for almost $2 billion.

Years later, when Daines was in the U.S. Senate, he would use Gianforte’s private plane, including to shuttle back and forth to Washington for key votes — at least 11 trips since 2017, according to financial disclosure reports.

Gianforte, one of the wealthiest members of the U.S. House, has been boosted in his run for Montana governor by Daines’ clout. A strong turnout for Gianforte could now help Daines fend off the challenge from Bullock, a two-term governor whose handling of the coronavirus has put him in the limelight.

The similarities between the two Republicans were on display during a recent joint interview after they toured a high tech manufacturing facility under construction in their hometown of Bozeman.

Stitting across from each other at a picnic table near the same office park that houses Oracle, Daines and Gianforte played off one another’s jokes and finished each other’s stories. Both men linked their political careers to their Christian faith. Daines is Presbyterian. Gianforte belongs to the fundamentalist Grace Bible Church.

“We’re here to serve and not be served,” Daines said.

“Service above expectations,” Gianforte added. “It’s the same theme.”

They cast the upcoming election as a stark choice pitting “socialist” policies of Democrats against the free enterprise system that Daines and Gianforte say propelled the economy and their own careers, creating several hundreds jobs in Montana along the way.

“This system we have in this country has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in the history of the world,” Gianforte said.

Asked if they had any political disagreements, they looked stumped. Daines finally shriveled his face and said Gianforte likes to eat the meat from black bears that he shoots.

“I’ll still take a good piece of beef,” Daines said with a laugh.

Democrats paint a more nefarious picture of the friendship, contending Daines and Gianforte rose to riches on the backs of American workers and that their claim to be job creators belies RightNow Technologies’ role helping companies outsource jobs overseas.

Corporate interests still dominate their agenda, said Montana Democratic Party spokeswoman Christina Wilkes, who described Daines and Gianforte as being in lockstep on corporate tax cuts and repealing provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

“They’re mega-wealthy, and they are out for people like themselves,” Wilkes said.

One area where the two Republicans differ is personality, said Amy Wiening, who worked for Daines and Gianforte on the sales team at RightNow.

Both were supportive of each other and their workers, she said. But where Daines was easygoing and always made time to talk about family or matters outside work, Gianforte was more driven and could be harsh in his delivery, she said.

“He reminds me of a doctor you would totally want to be your doctor because he would know what to do. But he would not want to console you if it’s bad news,” Wiening said.

Daines was first to enter politics, running for lieutenant governor in 2008 while still at RightNow. He lost, then left the company in 2012 for a successful campaign for the state’s sole U.S. House seat. He ran for Senate two years later, cruising to victory after the recently-installed Democratic incumbent, John Walsh, a former lieutenant governor under Bullock, quit amid plagiarism allegations.

Daines had been encouraging Gianforte to join him in politics. In 2016 Gianforte ran for governor, losing to Bullock in a tight race. He won the House seat once held by Daines in a special election months later.

To say the pair now represent the face of the Montana Republican Party would ignore the role of Trump, who has loomed at least as large on the state’s political scene and demands loyalty from Republicans.

Gianforte and Daines were initially lukewarm to Trump. When Trump headlined a rally in Billings as he neared victory in the 2016 primary, Gianforte skipped the event and issued a press release welcoming “another visit by a 2016 presidential candidate” without mentioning Trump. Daines told a Montana newspaper in the primary that Trump was “not my first choice, or even my second for president.”

They have since become ardent Trump loyalists. Gianforte caught the president’s attention when he body-slammed a reporter for The Guardian on the eve of his election to the House. “My kind of guy,” Trump said about Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanour assault after initially misleading investigators about what happened.

The fruits of the pair’s loyalty to Trump are now on display: The President tweeted his support for Gianforte on Wednesday and Vice-President Mike Pence headlined a rally last week near Bozeman where Gianforte and Daines spoke back-to-back and then enjoyed a lengthy shout-out from Pence.

Democrats as recently as 2014 held both Montana U.S. Senate seats, the governor’s mansion and a bevy of other statewide offices. The GOP has been in ascendance as the state has trended more conservative. The party now controls both chambers of the Legislature and every statewide post except governor and Democrat Jon Tester’s seat in the U.S. Senate.

Daines and Gianforte “fit the party like a glove right now,” University of Montana political analyst Rob Saldin said. If they sweep the November election, “that’s a real vindication of going in this much sharper, Trump-y direction for the party,” he said.

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Follow Matthew Brown on twitter: @MatthewBrownAP

Matthew Brown, The Associated Press

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BOJ's Rate Hike May Have Ripple Effect on Bonds, Businesses and Politics – Bloomberg

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The Bank of Japan finally ended an eight-year experiment with negative interest rates that has left more than $4 trillion in funds hunting for higher returns abroad. What comes next threatens to shake up money flows in Japan and across the world.

One of the biggest questions is what happens to that big ball of money stashed overseas in assets including US government bonds, European power stations and Singapore equities. So far, markets have taken Japan’s first interest-rate hike since 2007 in stride, as the yield differential still remains wide with other major economies. The yen even weakened slightly, with traders citing the BOJ’s promise to keep conditions accommodative as a sign there won’t be rapid tightening ahead. But the longer term effect is less certain.

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Former PQ minister turns back on politics, records jazz album

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A former minister with the Parti Québécois (PQ) says his time in politics is over, and he’s ready to focus on his first love: the arts.

“People have to remember that I was dealing with the arts for 30 years before I went into politics,” Maka Kotto tells CTV News a day before boarding a flight to his native Cameroon for a music festival. “After 14 years in politics, I felt that I did what I had to do. And so, I decided to get back to my old practices.”

Kotto represented the PQ in the riding of Bourget from 2008 to 2018 and was also the culture minister in Pauline Marois’ short-lived government.

In addition to his time in provincial politics, Kotto represented the Bloc Québécois from 2004 to 2008 in the Canadian House of Commons — the party’s first Black member of Parliament.

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“It drained my energy and I lost contact with my family, with my friends. When I was inside, I didn’t realize that,” he said. “My mother went to the other side in 2018 and I couldn’t say good-bye… I wrote a song about that.”

Kotto says his mother’s death was a moment that notably marked him.

“This was very awful. Until now, I still suffer for that,” he said. “You see, when you’re investing in politics, you have many, many sacrifices that you’re facing.”

Closing the political door and turning his attention back to music and acting was an effortless decision for the 62-year-old.

“This was much, much more, easier than politics,” he said.

Kotto says he remembers his father not liking the idea of him getting involved in the arts as a child — he wanted him to “be a good student.”

“The last time I sang, I was between 16 or 17 years old,” he recalls. “That was in college, at the boarding school church. It was a French Jesuit boarding school in Cameroon.”

When asked what’s scarier: putting out a jazz album or working in politics, Kotto doesn’t miss a beat.

“Oh, politics is scary because you don’t have fun in politics. You have problems every day, every night, every morning and you have to solve real problems,” he said. “When you’re singing, it’s a passion…The only goal you have to reach is to share what you feel.”

Kotto says he worked for about six months on his album, collaborating with the likes of Antoine Gratton, Taurey Butler and the Orchestre national de jazz de Montréal (ONJ).

“We have a lot of fun. That was the goal, and I hope that everybody listening to this album will have the same fun as the one we had in studio,” he said.

A few words he uses to describe his music: fun, love and friendship.

The release of Kotto’s first album is scheduled for the winter of 2024.

 

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Trump campaign defends his ‘bloodbath’ warning. Hear what political strategists think

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Trump campaign defends his ‘bloodbath’ warning. Hear what political strategists think

The Trump campaign is saying that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump was referring only to the US auto industry when he warned of a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t elected. Republican strategist Alice Stewart and Democratic strategist Maria Cardona debate what he meant.

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