Longtime Idaho political watcher - and player – Marty Peterson offers some historical perspective on this year’s defeat of the public school budget in the Senate and its larger implications, in a column today at Ridenbaugh.com; you can read it here. Peterson points to the events of 1963, when Idaho’s Republican Party lurched to the right, setting in motion a process that led to conservative Don Samuelson being elected governor for a single term, after which the Democrats and Cecil Andrus captured the governorship in 1970, for the first time in a quarter-century.

“If history repeats itself, there just may be some Democrats who are quietly celebrating the shift in the philosophical control of the Senate,” Peterson writes. “The question now is, what Republican is going to play the role of Don Samuelson in 2014? And what Democrat will play the role of Cecil Andrus in 2018? In 2018 it will have been 24 years since the Democrats last occupied the governor’s office. Just like it was in 1970 when Andrus defeated Samuelson.”