I was forwarded a juicy e-mail late last night from a tipster, but didn’t have time to blog about it and I woke up to find that Pogie at Intelligent Discontent had scooped me. Check his post out. The e-mail contains a 30 second TV spot, by Montana Conservative Families, contrasting Rick Hill and Ken Miller on…..family values.

Miller is shown with his family, described as a Jesus-loving devoted husband, a “John Wayne, Johnny Cash and John Deere” type of guy, if you will.

We are then shown Rick Hill’s mug, and are told that he is an adulterer.  A photo of a cocktail waitress, in revealing dress, is then shown, the face blurred out, along with headlines from when Rick Hill’s first wife went public with his infidelity during his the 1998 Congressional campaign (said infidelity having been consummated with a cocktail waitress).

The narrator tells an abbreviated story of how Hill was stepping out on his wife at “a motel bar,” which we know to be none other than the world famous Sip ‘N Dip lounge in Great Falls (soon to have its own reality show, by the way.)

One might conclude, as Pogie does, that Ken Miller is behind this ad, though there is nothing in the ad to confirm this.  What we do know is that the apparent ring leader of Montana Conservative Families, a woman named Nancy Davis, has sent several emails out in the past, some bashing moderate Republicans and specifically Rick Hill for not having “social conservative values.”

Ken Miller has recently attacked Hill directly in public, in a very personal way–making fun of Hill for spending most of his time in Palm Springs, California at his second home–but has never alluded to his extramarital past.  Only the Stapleton campaign has crossed that line, with Bob Keenan, Stapleton’s number two, suggesting that Hill’s “skeletons” would ultimately take him down.

The timing of this video is also interesting if you consider the simliarities to what occurred in the Democratic Primary in 2006 between John Morrison and Jon Tester.

A month or so before election day during the Tester-Morrison face-off, Lee Newspapers had a big front-page expose about Morrison’s extramarital affair. He had a relationship with a woman many years earlier, but when he became State Auditor, his office ended up investigating her new husband for securities fraud. This raised a question about whether Morrison should have recused himself from the investigation.

But before the story hit the paper in 2006, an effective whisper campaign was conducted against Morrison, with letters and e-mails making the rounds among Democrats, giving the story a certain ripeness.  We will see if this Ken Miller-Rick Hill business follows the same trajectory.