WHAT COLOR IS MONTANA?

It happened in November in Montana. Having contracted cancer from his
lifelong smoking habit, and suffering from the nausea and loss of
appetite that are typical side-effects of chemotherapy, a Marlboro man
type (with the blessing of his neighbors, who'd voted to help the
ailing old cowboy seek relief from a once-illegal plant) struck a
match on his boot heel, cupped the flame, brought it to his lips and
lighted a joint.

This development surprised some people.

The people it most surprised were not Montanans, or even Westerners,
but Eastern media types -- the folks who'd been on TV since the
election speechifying about "the values gap" dividing red and blue
America. These analysts had reached a consensus that was sweeping in
its implications and, if you thought about it for very long,
staggering in its simple-mindedness. There are two kinds of voters,
the formula said: the easygoing coffeehouse artistes who dwell on the
coasts and in small parts of the North, and the uptight white-chapel
patriots who live in the South, the middle and the West (or, as
geographers put it, "almost everywhere").

Because of its location relative to the Mississippi River and because
it voted overwhelmingly for President Bush, my home state, Montana,
was colored red and tossed on a pile with Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and all
those other cattle lands where men are still men, legend has it, and
women let them be, leading to rigid behavior in the voting booth.
Democrats? Hate 'em. Environmental laws? Them spotted owls are mighty
tasty. Firearms? Handy for shooting them spotted owls. Gay marriage?
Don't know; I'll have to ask my preacher. Ah, those predictable red
Westerners. They're either standing and saluting, kneeling and praying
or lying down and breeding.

But sitting and puffing weed? It didn't quite fit -- which might have
been partly why unruly Montana (which until a few years ago had no
daytime speed limit and still permits motorists to drink while driving
as long as they're not intoxicated) blurred the national political
color code by legalizing medical marijuana at the same time it backed
the Republican president. As for the other questions put before them,
Montanans didn't just split their ballots; they shredded them. They
elected their first Democratic governor in 16 years, upheld a
prohibition on toxic mining practices, broke the Republicans' hold on
the state Legislature but also amended the state Constitution to ban
gay marriage.

One problem with political science is that its laboratories are
unsecured, allowing real people to roam around inside them, spitting
in test tubes and fiddling with computers. Montanans, and Westerners
in general, are especially mischievous in this regard. For starters,
they're fond of circumventing the bigwigs by legislating through
popular initiatives -- a fondness that may explain why of the 11
states where doctors can prescribe cannabis to patients, 9 are in the
West. This tendency toward what might be called "vigilante
democracy" can make a hash of organized party politics and of
electoral models that link past behavior to future results. That's why
Arnold Schwarzenegger runs California now.

In Montana, the new Democratic governor, a beefy-looking rancher named
Brian Schweitzer, challenged what had become over the years a smug and
clubby conservative power structure by choosing a Republican running
mate who showed no more reverence for his party's orthodoxies than
Schweitzer showed for his. Schweitzer's display of independence
worked, and red Montana, like red Wyoming, red Arizona and red Kansas,
installed a blue leader, thus turning his state purple -- a color the
Eastern analysts seem blind to, but which Westerners recognize as the
color of sagebrush and, as the song says, of mountain majesties
(whatever those are).

Purple is also the color of certain strains of marijuana, particularly
the more potent ones. Most Montanans, I'd wager, don't know this from
experience, despite having passed last November's initiative with a 62
percent majority -- the largest in the history of such votes. And
since neither party discussed the issue much during the campaign
season, it seems fair to conclude that Montana's decision resulted
from independent thinking by thousands of voters. That's not supposed
to happen anymore. People vote with their congregation, right? Or
against those who belong to congregations.

What were Montanans' reasons for busting out of their assigned
political corral? My guess is that they had lots of little private
reasons -- Grandpa just won't eat since he got lung cancer; the
Beatles smoked dope, but they sure did write great songs; the stuff
can't be any worse for you than Vioxx -- and a handful of larger, more
thoughtful reasons linked to concerns about personal liberty,
prescription-drug costs and states' rights. When added together, these
reasons yielded an outcome: keep your hands off the Marlboro man; the
fellow's sick!

For journalists and political professionals, case-by-case outcomes
that arise from a welter of motivations won't pay the bills, though.
They need every election to have a moral -- and, ideally, a chart that
supports the moral as well as their authority to propound it. The
source of their power is their mania for order, which is why a state
like Montana, where people distrust order (and sometimes resist it
just because they can), makes such nonsense of their lovely maps.
Soon, of course, even this Western ornery streak will be classified
and given a color -- at which point Montanans may give up being ornery
out of sheer, redoubled orneriness and vote to make it illegal to own
firearms unless you're married, gay and stoned. Maybe the experts will
finally figure out then that the freedom some people cherish most (not
only in Montana) is the freedom from being figured out.