Obama Tries To Break A Bucking Bronc

Bronco Barack Obama decided to take his socialized medicine show to Bozeman, Montana. He figured the locals would be a pushover for his Chicago Wranglers and Union Rustlers. "Well, howdy pardner" said the real cowboys and Big Sky residents. And they proceeded to show the city slicker that you don't push Montanans around that easily.

In my final year of law school, I got so annoyed by all things California that I looked into the possibility of getting out of Dodge. One of several locations I looked into was Bozeman, Montana. What a place! Unfortunately, my wife got out her Sunset Gardening Book, and when she discovered that orchids didn't grow well in the Montana climate, my adventure was over. But when I read some of the reports of the Obama fiasco there, I at least had an idea of where he was and what he was facing. The people in the Bozeman area are not that far removed from the pioneers who built the West. They're courteous, but they're tough. And they don't take well to people coming into town to lecture them and bamboozle the rest of the nation into thinking that Montana is the alternate Obama heartland.

Those of us who don't live in the Rockies don't realize that Bozeman, with a population of less than 40,000 is considered a fairly large city by Montana standards. This is a state of great vistas (it's not called Big Sky Country for nothing), climate extremes, and great expanses of land between population centers. Fresh from his grand tour of the Grand Canyon, Obama took his show on the road and headed for Montana. He assumed that folks who were not from Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City wouldn't know a stage show when they saw one. And what a staged show this was.

Obama's impending visit was officially barely publicized. Bozeman and Belgrade both have arenas with places for parking, gathering, and seating. They are only large gymnasiums or auditoriums, but then you're not going to get a crowd of 100,000 to attend an Obama town hall photo op if you depend entirely on the locals in Montana. Still, Bronco Barack was taking no chances that even 3 or 4 thousand angry citizens were going to show up for his town hall lecture on socialized medicine. So he very quietly scheduled the meeting to take place at the airport which is located in a somewhat isolated area between Bozeman and Belgrade. On top of that, the meeting was to take place in an even more isolated hangar on the outskirts of the airport.

Lack of general notice to the public doesn't mean that the Obamacrats hadn't given notice to someone. How many SEIU members, ACORN workers and other paid operatives could there be in a state as sparsely populated as Montana? I don't know the answer to that question, but somehow they all managed to show up on schedule for the Obama arrival. And along with a contingent from Planned Parenthood, electronic bullhorns, and professionally-produced pro-Obama signs and tee-shirts, they arrived in large groups. In buses, and caravans.

But the Montanans are not the ignorant rubes that Obama had pictured. To start with, 94% of the citizens of Bozeman have high school diplomas, and 50% have bachelor's degrees or higher. Can Chicago say that? A few employees at the airport got wind of the visit, and the word quickly spread to Bozeman and beyond. Neighbor called neighbor, and pretty soon the word had gotten out all over the state. They were largely annoyed by Obama's tax plans (there had been earlier tea-party protests throughout the state, including the capital at Helena). They were even angrier about the Obama socialized medicine plan. But they were angriest of all about the way Obama and his press corps and community-organization thugs had set things up to make this town hall meeting look like Montana was Big Obama Country.

About 150 pro-Obama shills from the SEIU and other groups arrived in the middle of the night before the meeting. The locals hadn't organized themselves yet, so they were a bit surprised to find all the choice spots taken up by people that none of the locals recognized. The locals started arriving early the morning of the Obama Snake Oil show, only to find that outside squatters were already trying to control the venue. The local police ordered the shills to disperse from the central area in order to allow proper crowd-control and to give everyone an equal chance to get into the choice spots. The SEIU simply out-shouted and outnumbered the police and the early local arrivals.

Once again, the word spread quickly that this whole thing was nothing more than a giant photo op set up by the Obamists. That got the Montana adrenalin flowing. People began arriving from all over the state (and that's one helluva big state to drive around in). Meanwhile, the locals began to organize voluntarily (unlike the paid shills from the Obama camp). From being outnumbered three or four to one in the early morning, the protesters had by late morning or early afternoon more than equaled the number of the Obama paid apparatchiks. Eventually, to counter the SEIU bullhorns, some of the locals showed up with a fire truck to use as a stage, complete with a very loud public address system.

The SEIU members were very menacing in the early stages. But as the numbers of the protesters began to swell, they realized that their physical and obscenity-laced vocal threats were falling on deaf ears, and that they would soon be outnumbered. More Obama plants continued to arrive, always in groups, but the disparity in numbers continued to favor the protesters, and in ever-growing numbers. No organized groups showed up to protest. Just individuals, and families, and friends in small numbers that added up to bigger and bigger numbers. At least two of the SEIU thugs appeared to have gotten orders to start a fight. The locals were not the least bit intimidated, but refused to to rise to the bait. They knew that the paid photographers from the Obama groups would use a fight to prove that these ordinary citizens were actually vicious fascists using violence to shut down a peaceful Obama assembly.

By the time Bronco Barack arrived, the crowd was running about three or four to one against the President's message. Many had come completely neutral, prepared to ask hard questions, and ended up with the protesters because of the manner in which they were pushed out of the way by the Obama thugs. The Fund for Public Interest with its Montana headquarters in Missoula, had been paying its recruits $10 to $15 per hour to "go out into the communities and help make change happen." They were well-represented and well-paid at the Obama show. But none of their organized and funded activities were sufficient to overcome the spontaneous outpouring of local activism. The "community organizers" failed to make this an easy Obama victory.

Not only did the Obama photo op fail, but they weren't even smart enough to see what was coming. The Sunday before the Obama show was set up, Montana Senator Max Baucus had showed up at a protest meeting at the Museum of the Rockies. As one tea-party participant described it: "Baucus, who acted like John the Baptist clearing the way for the arrival of the Chosen One, was in town to promote the Make Health Happen Montana conference." Baucus got a real earful. The protesters credited Baucus with the courage to show up, and allowed him to speak. But he wasn't expecting the grueling question session that followed. So in order to cover his failure, he told the local newspaper that this was "the closest thing to a mob that I've ever experienced in my life." He then proceeded to tell an outright lie about a contingent of paid protesters being bused in from Texas.

So the airport photo op went terribly awry. The SEIU brigades on one side, and local cowboys, nurses, doctors, merchants, and other ordinary citizens with hand-lettered signs and serious questions on the other. Obama's Big Sky plan turned into the Obama Cow-Pie in the Sky town hall.

To all my fellow American citizens in Bozeman and throughout Montana, this San Franciscan says: "I love the smell of horse manure in the morning. It smells like victory!"