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By CHARLES S. JOHNSON
Gazette State Bureau

HELENA - Five years ago, as an obscure Montana Democrat named Brian Schweitzer geared up to challenge Republican U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, he came up with an idea that catapulted him into the state and national spotlight.

Schweitzer was the first candidate nationally to take busloads of senior citizens across the Canadian border where they could buy their prescription drugs much cheaper.

The first bus trip in the fall of 1999 attracted a number of Montana senior citizens and a couple of Montana statehouse reporters. Later trips drew more seniors, joined by reporters from the New York Times and USA Today. By the time Schweitzer and some seniors flew to Arizona and took some vanloads across the border into Mexico, CBS and NBC sent along camera crews.

Schweitzer, 48, whose campaign symbol is the light bulb to symbolize creative ideas, says he came up with the plan for the border runs the same way he gets all of his ideas.

"I just listen to a lot of folks," the Whitefish farmer says. "As you travel around, people tell you how much they're paying (for prescriptions) and how it's affecting their lives. I decided that the most demonstrative way we could show Congress was to put an entire busload of personal stories on a bus."

He adds: "I may be unconventional in the political world, but in the real world, it's what we do. You identify a problem, create a solution and bring people together to implement the solution."

Schweitzer had never run for political office before.

"In the fall of '99, was there anybody in Montana that believed I was going to defeat Conrad Burns for the Senate?" he asks. "I knew, win, lose or draw, I could make a difference, and I think we did."

Schweitzer lost that race, 51 to 47 percent, but he didn't mope and flee the political scene. Instead, Schweitzer never really quit campaigning. If anything, he stepped it up, even though he wasn't running for anything at the time. For 3½ years, he has crisscrossed the state, speaking to any Democratic or other group, big or small, that invited him and probably some that didn't.

When prominent current and former Democratic officeholders began sniffing around in 2002 and 2003 to decide whether they should run against unpopular Republican Gov. Judy Martz in 2004, they quickly learned that Schweitzer already enjoyed a huge advantage. Heading into 2004, Schweitzer, for all practical purposes, had the Democratic nomination sewn up in terms of organization and access to money.

Schweitzer faces off Tuesday against former House Speaker John Vincent of Gallatin Gateway, who didn't enter the race until mid-February, for the Democratic nomination. A Gazette State poll last week showed Schweitzer with a commanding 59 to 22 percent lead over Vincent and ahead of the top three Republicans running for governor.

Schweitzer has the biggest campaign war chest of anyone running for governor, having raised $833,851 as of May 19 and having spent $398,450 to leave a balance of $435,401. If he wins, that cash in the bank will give him a huge edge over whichever Republican wins the nomination, as Bob Brown and Pat Davison are spending every last penny trying to win the nomination.

Overflowing with ideas although he's politically untried, Schweitzer explains why he's running for governor:

"I'm a passionate guy and I'm passionate about Montana," he says. "I know it's the greatest place in the world to raise a family."

He adds, "We think we can achieve great things for Montana. The most important thing we can do is maintain it as the great place for raising a family and starting a small business."

Schweitzer is not lacking in self-confidence or - critics say - cockiness.

"I have had an innate ability of leading people since I was this small," Schweitzer says, gesturing to show a child's height. "I don't think you train leaders. Leaders are the result of their genetics and their environment."

All four of his grandparents - his mother's were half Irish and half German and his father's German Russian - homesteaded on Montana's Hi-Line. His parents, who farmed and raised cattle near Geyser, had six children. Schweitzer has three older brothers and a younger brother and sister.

Schweitzer was raking hay at age 6 and summer fallowing by 8 while raising champion steers and horses for 4-H. He won a 4-H speech contest and a trip to Chicago.

In 10th grade, Schweitzer was sent to a Benedictine school, Holy Cross Abbey in Colorado, where he worked his way through washing dishes, working in the cafeteria and shoveling stables. He graduated in 1973.

"In my family, the highest calling for Irish people is not president of the United States or a governor of state," he says. "It's a priest." That calling was not to be for Schweitzer.

"You cultivate the oak tree," he says. "Some of them turn out to be tall oak trees. Some of them turn out to be scrub-oak politicians."

Neither of his parents graduated from high school, Schweitzer says, but they had a passion for education and sent all six children to college, despite lacking the money.

Schweitzer went to Colorado State University, where he studied agronomy and held down a number of jobs. One year, he was elected national student president of the Soil Science Society of America.

"The very first thing I remember, he was giving a presentation for a very large group, several thousand people, to the Soil Science Society of America," recalls Jerry Nielsen, a professor emeritus in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University-Bozeman. "I was impressed with his presentation. He has a lot of enthusiasm. I thought, 'Why is the Montana guy going to Colorado State?' "

Nielsen recruited Schweitzer to come to MSU to get his master's degree under him in soil science.

"He was clearly a good communicator, confident and at the same time a really good listener," Nielsen says. "He would go anywhere to get advice. He was probably more interested in the application of science than in discovering new scientific principles. He was a very people-oriented and practical and entrepreneurial student. He was really wanting to make a difference."

Schweitzer's master's degree project involved examining the productive capacity of two different soils - Scobey soil and Kevin soil - under the same climate. His project was "pretty important," Nielsen says, and helped make MSU one of the leading universities in "precision agriculture" that used the global positioning system and electronic mapping to put fertilizers on the soils exactly where they were needed.

For his first job after leaving school, Schweitzer went to North Africa to work on a large irrigation project built on the Sahara Desert in Libya. No MSU graduate students wanted to go overseas but Schweitzer.

"I wanted to be involved in growing things where nobody else could," he says. "What's a better challenge than growing crops in the Sahara Desert?"

Then he went to work for a company in Saudi Arabia and helped build the world's largest dairy farm, with 10,000 milking cows.

He and his wife, Nancy, whom he married in 1982, returned to Montana in 1987 and settled in Whitefish, where they started a family. They farmed there while he continued to work on international agricultural projects. They later bought another farm near Forsyth that they traded last year for one closer to Whitefish.

Bruce Nelson of Bozeman was appointed by President Bill Clinton to be Montana's executive director of the Farm Service Agency. Schweitzer was appointed to the state committee by Clinton at U.S. Sen. Max Baucus' recommendation, and they worked closely together for six years.

"He's a bright guy," Nelson says. "He's an enjoyable guy to be around because he's very creative. He has been successful himself, but he .... is sympathetic to people who have a hard time."

Schweitzer once told Nelson about how when he was growing up, when he saw a bully beating somebody up, he'd jump in the fight on behalf of the person the bully was picking on.

Nelson is a former chairman of the Montana Democratic Party who has seen a lot of politicians from both parties for more than three decades. Here's how he sizes up Schweitzer:

"He's little bits and pieces of all of them that have been successful," Nelson says. "I think he has the strong convictions of Pat Williams. He listens to Montanans the way that Max Baucus does and tries to reflect that in his emphasis on issues. He is very analytical in a way that I think Marc Racicot is very analytical. He's got an independent streak like a John McCain because he's not afraid to take on the established orthodoxies, whether it's ideological orthodoxies or party orthodoxies.

"Brian comes from a rural background and was very successful in agriculture the way Ted Schwinden was. Tom Judge worked hard on moving a political agenda and working with a Legislature to move a political agenda and vision, and that's part of Brian."

Another prominent Democrat, former Havre Rep. Ray Peck, who now lives in Helena, sees Schweitzer this way:

"I think he'd be a guy that would take a lot of risks," Peck says. "He's going to be a doing governor. He's not going to be sitting back and letting things come to him."