WASHINGTON (AP) – It’s one thing to be Montana’s lieutenant governor. It’s another to be a U.S. Senate candidate in one of the states that will determine which party controls that 100-member chamber.
As Sen. John Walsh of Montana learned this week, one difference is the huge amount of resources poured into “opposition research,” to flyspeck a candidate’s history of comments, business dealings, legal actions, romances, health, writings and countless other items in search of a flaw that might cripple his or her campaign.
Walsh, a Democrat, wasn’t universally known even in Montana when he became lieutenant governor in 2013. He was obscure nationally when he was appointed last February to fill the Senate seat vacated by six-term Democrat Max Baucus.
On Thursday, however, he found his name and photo on the front page of the New York Times, plus several Montana newspapers, and not in a helpful way. The Times reported that much of Walsh’s 2007 master’s thesis was lifted from other publications without adequate credit, which is considered a serious academic offense.
Walsh partly blamed the insufficient attribution on post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in combat in Iraq.