Cliff’s Note:
I don't endorse folks who aren't Democrats. That's not a thing I usually do. I'm doing it anyway. Seth Bodnar. Green Beret. Iraq, 2003. Ran the University of Montana for eight years.
Won't caucus with either party if he gets there.
I asked him about Hegseth's loyalty tests inside the Pentagon. He said: "That's not what I fought for. That's not what my friends died for."
That's when I decided. Vote Bodnar in Montana.
—Cliff
Cliff sat down with Seth Bodnar for a special edition of Amped Up, and the moment that landed hardest had nothing to do with polling. Bodnar—West Point graduate, Green Beret, infantry platoon leader in Iraq in 2003, and for eight years president of the University of Montana—described stacking up against a wall outside a suspected safe house in the middle of the night, and the one question that never came up: what party are you a part of.
He carried that straight to Pete Hegseth’s loyalty tests inside the Pentagon and refused to soften it. “That’s not patriotic. That’s not what I fought for. That’s not what my friends died for.” The same argument runs through his answer on Iran, where he says Congress has abdicated its constitutional war powers out of blind partisan loyalty, and that abdication is precisely how you lose a war.
The rest is economic populism with a Montana accent. The politics are the part progressives will argue about: he won’t caucus with either party, he wants a bloc of independent-minded senators instead, and he says Montana deserves a senator who doesn’t work for Chuck Schumer and isn’t afraid of Donald Trump. Jon Tester, Max Baucus, two former state Democratic Party chairs, a former Republican governor, and the former Montana GOP chair have all lined up behind him. By the end of the interview, so had Cliff.
