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Schweitzer able
to grab spotlight
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."
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