How Can You Not Like This Guy?

John Tester, I mean...
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Fresh Off the Farm in Montana, a Senator-to-Be
By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYTimes

GREAT FALLS, Mont., Nov. 9 — When he joins the United States Senate in January, big Jon Tester — who is just under 300 pounds in his boots — will most likely be the only person in the world’s most exclusive club who knows how to butcher a cow or grease a combine.

All his life, Mr. Tester, 50, has lived no more than two hours from his farm, an infinity of flat on the windswept expanse of north-central Montana, hard by the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation.

For all the talk about the new Democrats swept into office on Tuesday, the senator-elect from Montana truly is your grandfather’s Democrat — a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916.

It is a place with 105-degree summer days and winter chills of 30 below zero, where his grandparents are buried, where his two children learned to grow crops in a dry land entirely dependent on rainfall, and where, he says, he earned barely $20,000 a year farming over the last decade.

“It’s always been tight, trying to make a living on that farm,” said Mr. Tester, still looking dazed and bloodshot-eyed after defeating Senator Conrad Burns, a three-term incumbent, by fewer than 3,000 votes.

Chouteau County, where Mr. Tester lives on a homestead of 1,800 acres, lost 8.5 percent of its population in the last five years — typical of much of rural America that has been in decline since the Dust Bowl.

To make extra money, Mr. Tester taught music to schoolchildren, and still plays a decent trumpet despite having only seven fingers (he lost the rest to a meat grinder as a child). He got into politics just eight years ago in a sustained rage over what utility deregulation had done to small farmers and businesses in Montana.

“You think of the Senate as a millionaire’s club — well, Jon is going to be the blue-collar guy who brings an old-fashioned, Jeffersonian ideal about being tied to the land,” said Steve Doherty, a friend of Mr. Tester’s for 20 years. “He’s a small farmer from the homestead. That’s absolutely who he is. That place defines him.”

Mr. Tester used to ride his motorcycle down from the farm to Great Falls to play softball with Mr. Doherty. He played third base, not an easy position for a man with a shortage of digits. They were colleagues later in the State Senate, of which Mr. Tester was the president this year. It is a part-time job, with the Legislature holding regular sessions of 90 days only every other year.

Congress has done little to improve the lives of people living in the dying towns across rural America, Mr. Doherty said.

“When Jon talks about the cafe that’s trying to hold on, the hardware store that just closed, the third generation that can’t make a living on the farm, he is living that life,” Mr. Doherty said.

Still, there was never a master plan, Mr. Tester said, for the arc that took him from soil conservation district leader to state senator to one of the victors who gave Democrats control of the Senate.

“I’m kind of a fatalist,” he said, breaking into a smile. “The good Lord gives you opportunities.”

And Mr. Tester learned quickly how to exploit those opportunities, running a bare-knuckle campaign against Mr. Burns, with a barrage of name-calling and negative advertisements making hay of the senator’s ties to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced former Washington lobbyist.

Republicans complained that Mr. Tester’s campaign was relentless and went overboard. Montana is a big state with a small population, where politicians are known on a first-name basis. The ferocity of such attacks seemed out of place, some here said.

Also, they said Mr. Tester favored measures while in the State Senate that had the effect of raising taxes on many of the small businesses that he promotes. They called him “Taxer Tester” for much of election year.

But with his trademark flattop — refreshed every three weeks for $8 at the Riverview barber shop here in Great Falls — Mr. Tester was a tough target for Republicans to stereotype as “just another Washington insider,” as one radio attack ad put it.

Republicans have kept their hold on the intermountain West in part by promoting issues known as the three G’s: gays, guns and God.

On gays, Mr. Tester says the “sacred document” of the Constitution should not be amended to outlaw same-sex marriage, though he favored a state ban that voters passed in 2004. On guns, Mr. Tester is quite proficient in their use, and says anyone — Republican or Democrat — who tries to take his away will run into trouble. On God, Mr. Tester says simply that he is a churchgoer, and notes that he met his wife when he spotted her in a pew.

“The fact is, I’m just a regular Montanan,” he said. “Those issues are important, but what I heard from people is concern about health care, fiscal responsibility and how we’re throwing so much money into a war.”

Mr. Tester and his wife of 28 years, Sharla, grow organic lentils, barley, peas and gluten-free grain in a county with 1.5 people per square mile. It is all earth and sky on the Tester family ground. A hundred years ago, a region with so few people was considered frontier.

Mr. Tester is very much in the mode of his longtime friend Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat who can be more prickly than Mr. Tester. The governor recalled a favorite moment with Mr. Tester from the last legislative session.

“We’re sitting there in this room where governors and powerful people used to drink whiskey and smoke cigars, me and Jon, and both of us had a bag of sunflower seeds — Russian peanuts we call them — trying to spit the shells into a cup,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “We looked at each other and laughed, like, What are we doing here?”

Republicans said that Mr. Tester was a favorite of “extreme liberal bloggers” and that the down-home persona masked an agenda out of step with much of America.

And indeed, the liberal Web site Daily Kos took up Mr. Tester’s cause early. When he announced he was running for the Senate, he was an underdog to a better-financed and better-known Democrat who was being promoted by the party establishment.

After Mr. Tester won the primary by a huge margin, Daily Kos posted a picture of him on its site, with the caption, “Say hello to the next senator from the great state of Montana.”

Mr. Tester is also a favorite of the band Pearl Jam, which promotes many liberal causes. But his tie is personal. The area around the town of Big Sandy, population 658 and falling, produced not only Mr. Tester, but also Jeff Ament, the bassist for Pearl Jam. The band did a concert in Missoula this year for Mr. Tester.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Tester spoke often of how “regular folks” just “haven’t been given much of a shake.” He is distrustful of global trade agreements that have hurt farmers, and big drug companies and health maintenance organizations that he says have put medical costs out of reach for many people.

Asked why he became a Democrat in a region that has been overwhelmingly Republican for the last generation, Mr. Tester said: “It started with my parents, who always said the Democrats work for the middle class. And in agriculture, Franklin Roosevelt did a lot of good things.”

Friends say not to worry about Mr. Tester going native in Washington. He said he planned to return home to the farm several times a month. He promised his barber, Bill Graves, that he would continue to come back to get his hair cut in the same wheat-field bristle.

“I haven’t noticed a change yet,” Mr. Graves said. “He’s the same man. Got a real dry sense of humor. We talk about everything. And then he says, ‘See you next time.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/u...=1163480400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

 

As a Repub, Flake's OK... he'll try for Gov or Sen at some point. He does have Wham! teeth though...