Like some leftist Dr. Dolittle, Mr. Bullock has a talent for knowing how to talk Republicans into doing Democratic things (including voting for him). It resulted in his re-election in 2016 in a state President Trump won by over 20 points. His crafty approach involves good manners, logic and a willingness to compromise when he can (and veto when he won’t). He sees the good in Republicans because there is good to be seen: Several of the conservative legislators who voted to support the public universities attended them.

This week, Governor Bullock will make his debate debut. As a Montana Democrat, I look forward to it because I have no idea what he sounds like trying to appeal to members of his own party. I assume that’s how he got and kept his job. When he goes out stumping for one of his squishy liberal plots to get fewer people killed, he tends to choose words that won’t make wheat farmers barf. Why, no, old coot in a feed store cap from Roundup, he’s not going to expand Medicaid, he’s going to “bring our taxpayer dollars home.”

Based on Mr. Bullock’s last gubernatorial debate, his competitors in the next contest have no hope of outfoxing him on questions about the business equipment tax, unless Marianne Williamson has also figured out how to get out-of-state corporations to pay for the fire departments of Yellowstone County. On the off chance there’s a question about the nuts and bolts of actual governance, I wonder how the governor could explain, in under 60 seconds, the coalitions of strange bedfellows he conjures to solve problems in a state with seven sovereign Indian nations that’s crammed into a single ridiculous congressional district the size of Japan.

His council on how Montana was going to comply with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan included a never-boring, ex-miner Republican state senator you definitely want pissing from the tent , the Montana Wildlife Federation, the Farmers Union, energy company executives, a couple of Democrats from the Environmental Quality Council, the chairman of the Crow tribe and for all I know the ghost of Norman Maclean. Is it just me or is this sort of room where everybody’s irked for different civic-minded reasons kind of what James Madison had in mind?

Currently, the top four Democratic front-runners, three of whom are Democrats, all represent the country’s edges, the Left Coast and the Other Left Coast. Theoretically this geography doesn’t matter since the Republican incumbent hails from New York City; but he, like his grasp on reality, exists outside the space-time continuum. Think back: What was the most obvious thing about Barack Obama? That’s right — he came from Illinois. A coastal Democrat has not won the general election in 59 years.