Republicans for Trauner

Banner headline this morning in Cheyenne’s paper, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle: "Trauner nets unlikely ally: Prominent Republican backs Dem; Cubin camp unfazed."

Gary Trauner, of course, is the Democratic Party challenger to Rep. Barbara Cubin in the race for WYO’s lone U.S. House seat. It’s been an exciting race, thus far, especially for us Dems who have been disappointed so many times in this race and also in U.S. Senate battles.

This "prominent Republican" is Steve Simonton from Cody. He’s formed a political action committee, Republicans for Trauner, and is serious in his support for the Dem underdog. Simonton says he supported Cubin in her first House race in 1994, the year the Repubs took over. Since then, he’s been disturbed by the actions of the Congressional majority, particularly Cubin’s tendency to follow the Bush agenda on every issue.

Simonton said this in the WTE article: "I believe that well over the majority of Wyoming citizens do not identify with the agenda of the religious right. Moderate Republicans are more tolerant and open-minded than they are."

He’s particularly irked by Cubin’s anti-choice stance on abortion and her votes against stem-cell research. For the most part, WYO’s vaunted Republicans, in both the House and senate, have been less likely to follow the dictates of the religious zealots who call the GOP’s tune. Former U.S. Senator Al Simpson is a traditional conservative from a long line of WYO Republicans. Yet he supported a woman’s right to choose.

Both of our senators, Craig Thomas and Mike Enzi, are down-to-earth guys with common sense approaches to many issues. However, they also have toed the right-wing line during the Bush administration. Enzi surprised many people when he went ballistic a few years ago over the Terry Schiavo case. He was at the forefront of the Congressional effort to intervene to keep the brain-dead Florida woman alive. That sort of behavior is scorned in WYO, where nothing can anger the citizenry more than the Feds poking their nose into gun ownership, grazing rights, property rights, open container laws, education, the right to be a jackass in public, etc. It must be noted that we hate the intervention but we love the tax dollars the Feds shower on our state.

Simonton noticed that Cubin’s primary opponent, Bill Winney, received 40 percent of the vote, beating Cubin handily in Teton County (Trauner’s home) and here in Laramie County. He also came close in Natrona County. As Simonton wrote in a letter to the editor printed 10/6/06 in the WTE: "Mrs. Cubin received a 40 percent negative vote from her own party in the August primary election, and I concluded that there must be a lot of other Republicans that feel she is a liability to Wyoming."

So he formed Republicans for Trauner. Meanwhile, Cubin keeps attacking Trauner on TV and radio ads, while Trauner takes the high road in his ads by telling Wyomingites what he will do once he’s in D.C. Cubin hopes that mudslinging will obscure her own dismal performance. I’m betting that it won’t.