11taxes.’’ One imagines her driven mad by
this criticism, a shut-in forced to retreat
from an angry mob that blames her for
bipartisanship and low taxes, but Wil-
liams reassures us. ‘‘I don’t care what
Washington thinks,’’ she says, ‘‘in Mon-
tana we do things our way.’’ By now she’s
holding a beer in a bar. ‘‘I bet they think
I shouldn’t have a beer in my ad, either.’’
In appearing with a beer on camera,
Williams joins such political outsiders
as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Eliz-
abeth Warren and Chuck Schumer.
From a certain perspective, it is odd
that a Democratic candidate for Congress
would build her advertisement around
the message that she loves Reagan and
hates Washington. At the same time, it
is utterly bland and familiar — standard
fare if you live in the Mountain West or,
increasingly, anywhere else with more
livestock than people. Montana is a kind
of Champagne region for intensely folksy
political advertising, having perfected a
signifi ers-over-substance approach that
has pervaded the nation.
Very little polling is done here; nation-
al fi rms track the federal and guberna-
torial elections, but information about
voters’ opinions on particular issues ishard to come by. Montana State Univer-
sity, Billings, conducts an annual survey
of about 500 respondents, but its results
are released in October, when messaging
strategies are already settled. As a result,
candidates fall back on what little they
know for sure: Montanans overwhelming-
ly support access to public lands, particu-
larly for recreational activities like hunting
and fi shing. Williams is especially strong
in this area; she moved to Helena in 1995
to take a research-analyst position with the
Legislative Environmental Policy Offi ce,
and she was the executive director of a
nonprofi t association of fi sh and wildlifeBig Sky, IndeedArea of Montana’s
lone congressional
district: 146,
square milesArea of the smallest
congressional district
in the U.S. (N.Y.-13):
10 square miles