Butch Otter Rides Again

Idaho' next governor demonstrates the possibilities--and limits--of libertarian politics in the Republican Party.

David Weigel from the November 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

Otter was 35, and any reporter or politician would have told you he was a spent force in Idaho politics. It has taken almost three decades for him to come back and fight for the most powerful office in his state. Otter’s ideals are libertarian—and have often crashed against the wall of Idaho’s political reality. He provides a case study of how libertarian ideals fare when they leave the realm of intellectual debate and enter partisan politics, even in a state, like Idaho, whose voters have a tradition of supporting smaller government.

The State Makes the Man

To understand Butch Otter, you have to understand Idaho. That’s one reason Otter has slipped past the media’s microscope. To pundits on both coasts, the 43rd state is remote and alien, the least comprehensible state in the Rockies. Utah has its Mormon culture, Montana has its range life, and Wyoming has its mountains and national parks. Idaho has nothing so distinguishing. It has potatoes and salmon (and Mormons, too, as we’ll see), but who can say what else?

Sun Valley, the part of the state most likely to be visited by members of the coastal elites, is a liberal oasis that has little relation to the rest of Idaho—a clone of Cape Cod plunked between two mountains. Four years ago Sen. Larry Craig (a Republican, like every Idaho senator since Democrat Frank Church was defeated in 1980) bridled at Sun Valley’s very name. “Someone from back East once said, ‘Oh, you represent Sun Valley,’ ” Craig told a reporter for the Idaho Mountain Express. “And I told him, ‘No, I don’t represent Sun Valley.’ ”

The resort area’s surrounding county, Blaine, is the only county in the state that voted Democratic for president in 2000 and 2004. In both races, George W. Bush received more than two-thirds of the state’s votes. (Both times, the Libertarian Party candidate’s share of the vote far exceeded his national average.) Idaho is safely Republican and hasn’t been seriously up for grabs since Lyndon Johnson squeaked 5,000 ballots past Barry Goldwater back in 1964.

What makes the state and its people so conservative and so Republican? It all started with the Mormons. The state had been settled by the same hodgepodge of miners and rebuffed Confederates as other Western states, and these pioneers, Protestant and Catholic, voted for Democrats. In the 1880s, just as the Idaho territory was becoming a serious candidate for statehood, Mormons were coming up from Utah to settle and spread the gospel of Joseph Smith. Idahoans blanched and rushed into the arms of the anti-Mormon GOP. The Republicans eventually lost the upper hand, battered by union activism and prairie populism; they were resurgent in the 1920s, then obliterated by the New Deal and its handout-happy liberal Democrats.

While party loyalties shifted back and forth, Idaho voters generally stayed skeptical of big government. The Democrats’ rise to power in the ’30s was short-lived, as most Idahoans opposed tax increases, demanded tight budgets from their government, and preferred business investment over an intrusive welfare state. Idahoans were, and are, incredibly spread out geographically, with small towns and the occasional small city nestling between dozens of miles of mountains and desert. In this state nine times larger than New Jersey, it took until 1990 for the population to hit 1 million. Except in moments of national crisis like the Depression or a world war, Idaho voters wanted their government to do as little as possible.

“Idaho is a doctrinally conservative state,” says Bill Hall, a retired editorial page editor for the Lewiston Morning Tribune and former press secretary for Sen. Frank Church. “The people are 30 percent liberal and 60 percent conservative, and the rest flip back and forth. Anybody in either party who wanted to get elected had to be conservative. If he’s running now he has to oppose gun control, has to advocate for states’ rights.”

This was the climate that in 1942 welcomed Clement Leroy Otter, the sixth of Ben and Regina Otter’s nine children. The family lived in the city of Caldwell in southwestern Idaho, a fast half-hour’s drive from Boise. Ben Otter was an electrician who dabbled in local politics; his wife ran a farm that included 360 acres of grain and an 80-cow dairy.

“I was raised by a real tough, hard-working father and mother,” Otter says. “And I’m Catholic, so a lot of my direction came from the Catholic Church. I attended Catholic school most of my life. I spent a little time studying to become a Catholic priest!”

Catholicism provided, among other things, the “Butch” nickname. Nuns called Otter “Clem,” which happened to be the name of the bumbling yokel character (last name: Kadiddlehopper) on Red Skelton’s TV show. A few schoolyard fights later, Otter emerged with minor bruises and a new nickname.

“To come from a strong, Catholic union family,” Otter says, “and to end up being a Republican conservative, was, I guess, unique. When they polled us Catholic high school kids in 1960, everybody voted for Kennedy.

“In 1964, which was the first time I got to vote, I went down to get information, and it just so happened the Democrat and Republican booths were together. So I picked up the material to register as a Democrat, and as I walked out there happened to be a lady I knew, Peg Lundy, working the Republican booth. She said ‘Butch, if you’re going to take their stuff, you have to take our stuff too.’ So to be polite I went over and picked up a bag full of Republican stuff.”

Otter was volunteering at a hospital, and when on break he would “sit there and read that stuff. One of the things in there was The Conscience of a Conservative, by Barry Goldwater, and I read this because I knew Peggy Lundy was going to ask me some questions! But the more I read, the more I liked. Goldwater’s conclusion was that a government strong enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have. And I said, ‘Boy, that makes sense to me.’ So I ended up voting for Barry Goldwater instead of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.”

1964 brought concerns more pressing than a presidential race. That was the year Otter married Gay Simplot, the daughter of J.R. Simplot. Otter started at the bottom of his father-in-law’s company, shoving potatoes into the water trough of the Caldwell potato plant while pursuing a political science degree at the College of Idaho across town. He got the degree in 1967; four years after that, he was promoted to vice president at J.R. Simplot. He was enjoying himself at the company, but he’d spent a little time as a page in the state legislature 30 minutes down the road, and he’d liked that too. And by that time he was involving himself more and more in a “fringe” movement in Canyon County.