No Road Map For Democrats As Race Ends

Supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton protested Saturday as the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee met in Washington to discuss seating the Michigan and Florida delegations.

The New York Times reports:

The big drama now facing the Democratic Party in the presidential contest is how, when and even whether Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will depart the race.

The contest is coming to a close as Puerto Rico votes on Sunday and Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday, finishing a process that began five months ago in Iowa. Even if those results do not put Senator Barack Obama over the top, aides to both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton said they expected enough superdelegates to rally behind Mr. Obama in the 48 hours after the final primaries to allow him to proclaim himself the nominee.

In many ways, Mr. Obama is wheezing across the finish line after making a strong start: He has won only 6 of the 13 Democratic contests held since March 4, drawing 6.1 million votes, compared with 6.6 million for Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton has kept her counsel about what she might do to draw her campaign to a close. But when the rules committee of the Democratic Party divided up delegates from Michigan and Florida on Saturday night, Harold Ickes, a committee member and Clinton adviser, said she was reserving the right to contest the decision into the summer.

Still, despite the fireworks, Mrs. Clinton’s associates said she seemed to have come to terms over the last week with the near certainty that she would not win the nomination, even as she continued to assert, with what one associate described as subdued resignation, that the Democrats are making a mistake in sending Mr. Obama up against Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Her associates said the most likely outcome was that she would end her bid with a speech, probably back home in New York, in which she would endorse Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton herself suggested on Friday that the contest would end sometime next week.

But that is not a certainty; Mr. Obama’s announcement on Saturday that he would leave his church was just another reminder of how events continue to unfold in the race. She has signaled her ambivalence about the outcome, continuing to urge superdelegates to keep an open mind and consider, for example, the number of popular votes she has won. Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a superdelegate who has been at the forefront of calling for uncommitted Democrats to make a choice soon after the last vote, said in an interview that Mrs. Clinton called him last week and urged him to “keep an open mind until the convention.”

Assuming Mr. Obama reaches the number of delegates and superdelegates he needs to secure the nomination in the coming week, Mrs. Clinton will be faced with three options, associates said: to suspend her campaign and endorse Mr. Obama; to suspend her campaign without making an endorsement; or to press the fight through the convention. Several of Mrs. Clinton’s associates said it was unlikely she would fight through the convention, given the potential damage it would do to her standing in the party, which is increasingly eager to unify and turn to the battle against Mr. McCain.

Mrs. Clinton would almost surely face the defection of some of her highest-profile supporters, as well as some members of her staff. She would no doubt also face anger from Democratic leaders.

“In order for us to be successful in November, the runner-up is going to have to go all out in support of the nominee,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The runner-up is going to have to be there from Day One. The support is going to have to be more than just lip service.”

Mr. Obama’s associates calculate he will need the votes of probably just 30 more superdelegates — elected Democrats and party leaders — to claim a majority of delegates after the last primary vote is counted, assuming expected outcomes in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana.

With approval Saturday by the Democratic Party’s rules committee to seat Florida’s and Michigan’s delegates, though with a half vote each, Mr. Obama had secured 2,047.5 delegates, according to a count by The New York Times, leaving him 70.5 delegates short of what he needs to win the nomination. Eighty-six delegates are going to be allocated in Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota, and Mr. Obama is likely to get at least half of them.

As of Saturday, about 150 superdelegates remained officially uncommitted. Mr. Obama’s supporters have been hammering away at them, urging them to move quickly to his camp.

“A number of people have reported that various members intend to endorse AFTER the last primary,” said one e-mail message to wavering delegates from Mr. Obama’s supporters, its warning barely couched. “Those members need to understand that they won’t get any visibility from that.”

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who endorsed Mr. Obama nearly two months ago, recently called Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, who has yet to endorse a candidate. “Hey, Ritter!” Mr. Richardson said. “After June 3, it means nothing. Those who take a little bit of a risk, he’ll remember you.”

On the other end of the line, Mr. Ritter demurred, saying he had pledged to remain neutral until the primary season ends.

Mr. Obama has already turned his campaign away from Mrs. Clinton to face Mr. McCain. Mrs. Clinton is barely mentioned by Mr. Obama anymore, and his schedule is now focused as much on general election battlegrounds as it is on the remaining primaries. Mr. Obama is planning to mark the final election night of this primary season in St. Paul.

“That’s where the Republican convention is going to be,” said David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist. “It seems like a good place to start the discussion about which direction we’re going to go as a country.”

Similarly, Mrs. Clinton and her aides have all but stopped their attacks on Mr. Obama, and the once vigorous Clinton war room has gone into a slumber.

Indeed, the talk in Mrs. Clinton’s headquarters has turned from the primary to more mundane matters: the next job, whom Mr. Obama might hire from the Clinton campaign, and even where to go on vacation.

The question in the weeks ahead is the extent to which the bitterness between these two candidates, both historic figures, can be erased. Two associates who spoke to Mrs. Clinton said they had no doubt that she would campaign for Mr. Obama without ambivalence, whether or not they end up as a ticket, one of the big questions lingering.

One of Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategists, Howard Wolfson, hinted that she was not inclined to carry the battle to the convention.

“Our focus is on securing the nomination for ourselves in the near term,” he said. “I don’t think anybody is looking toward the convention to end this process.”

While there are sore feelings on both sides, Mr. Obama has directed his aides to begin reaching out to their counterparts in the Clinton camp.

Mr. Obama’s advisers said he would make no formal statement of victory, with the assumption that the moment would be elaborately marked by the media.

At least a dozen uncommitted delegates are viewed by both camps as almost certain to side with Mr. Obama once the primary season ends. But there are dozens of uncommitted superdelegates who resisted endorsements for reasons that are personal, political and pragmatic — ranging from a fear of alienating contributors to reluctance among lawmakers from relatively conservative districts to be identified with either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton.

As Logging Fades, Rich Carve Up Open Land in West

The NY Times reports:


William P. Foley II pointed to the mountain. Owns it, mostly. A timber company began logging in view of his front yard a few years back. He thought they were cutting too much, so he bought the land.

Mr. Foley belongs to a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests.

In style and temperament, this new money differs greatly from the Western land barons of old — the timber magnates, copper kings and cattlemen who created the extraction-based economy that dominated the region for a century.

Mr. Foley, 62, standing by his private pond, his horses grazing in the distance, proudly calls himself a conservationist who wants Montana to stay as wild as possible. That does not mean no development and no profit. Mr. Foley, the chairman of a major title insurance company, Fidelity National Financial, based in Florida, also owns a chain of Montana restaurants, a ski resort and a huge cattle ranch on which he is building homes.

But arriving here already rich and in love with the landscape, he said, also means his profit motive is different.

“A lot of it is more for fun than for making money,” said Mr. Foley, who estimates he has invested about $125 million in Montana in the past few years, mostly in real estate.

The rise of a new landed gentry in the West is partly another expression of gilded age economics in America; the super-wealthy elite wades ashore where it will.

With the timber industry in steep decline, recreation is pushing aside logging as the biggest undertaking in the national forests and grasslands, making nearby private tracts more desirable — and valuable, in a sort of ratchet effect — to people who enjoy outdoor activities and ample elbow room and who have the means to take title to what they want.

Some old-line logging companies, including Plum Creek Timber, the country’s largest private landowner, are cashing in, putting tens of thousands of wooded acres on the market from Montana to Oregon. Plum Creek, which owns about 1.2 million acres here in Montana alone, is getting up to $29,000 an acre for land that was worth perhaps $500 an acre for timber cutting.

“Everybody wants to buy a 640-acre section of forest that’s next to the U.S. Forest Service or one of the wilderness areas,” said Plum Creek’s president and chief executive, Rick Holley.

As a result, population is surging in areas surrounding national forests and national parks, with open spaces being carved up into sprawling wooded plots, enough for a house and no nosy neighbors.

Here in Flathead County, on the western edge of Glacier National Park, the number of real estate transactions, mostly for open land, rose by 30 percent from 2003 to 2006, according to state figures. The county’s population is up 44 percent since 1990.

The United States Forest Service projects that over the next 25 years, an area the size of Maine — all of it bordering the national forests and grasslands — will face development pressure and increased housing density.

But the equally important force is the change in ownership. According to a Forest Service study, not yet published, more than 1.1 million new families became owners of an acre or more of private forest from 1993 to 2006 in the lower 48 states, a 12 percent increase. And almost all the net growth, about seven million acres, was in the Rocky Mountain region.

Institutions, pension funds and real estate investment trusts have been particularly aggressive buyers. Over the last 10 years, at least 40 million acres of private forest land have changed hands nationwide, said Bob Izlar, the director of the Center for Forest Business at the University of Georgia. It is a turnover that Mr. Izlar said was unmatched at least since the Great Depression.

Here in the West, questions of clout and class have been raised by the new arrivals.

This year, the conservation group Trout Unlimited, which had been considering ending its involvement in disputes between private landowners and fishermen over public access to fishing streams, backtracked after its members rose up in protest. Some members accused the group of siding with the landowners by not fighting for fishermen’s access rights.

In parts of Colorado where communities have committed tax money to preserve open space, conflicts have erupted on the borders of the public lands over whether the programs — which in many cases buy out an owner’s right to develop property, but not the property itself — are simply enriching landowners who keep the land and the public off, too.

“When you’re there, you’re on four million acres,” said Michael Carricarte, who bought an 800-acre property in Glenwood Springs, Colo., in 2005, and now has the place, bordered on three sides by federal land, up for sale, asking $23.5 million.

“To get to where our property touched public land would take three hours by public road, but from our house it was 10 minutes by four-wheeler or Jeep," he said.

Mr. Carricarte, 39, said he was now in the process of selling a conservation easement to the Aspen Valley Land Trust that would lock 600 acres, all bordering public land, into permanent preservation.

Longtime residents tied to the old timber economy are finding it difficult to keep up. In parts of New Mexico and Colorado, the timber industry has all but collapsed; log harvests in the national forests have fallen to about one-fourth of what they were 20 years ago in the Rocky Mountain region, and less than a tenth what they were in the Pacific Northwest.

Some privately owned timberlands have increased production, but in the West, where more than two-thirds of all forest land is publicly owned (compared with about one-sixth in the eastern United States) private owners, even if they want to allow logging, cannot make up the difference.

Ronald H. Buentemeier, a second-generation forester, said he struggled every day to get enough wood to stoke the family-owned mill he runs in Montana, the F. H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Company.

“There’s not enough private land out there,” said Mr. Buentemeier, a blunt-talking 66-year-old with a flat-top crew cut. “We’ve been pulling rabbits out of the hat to keep going.”

In ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, environmentalists and representatives of the timber industry are reaching across the table, drafting plans that would get loggers back into the national forests in exchange for agreements that would set aside certain areas for protection.

Both groups are feeling under siege: timber executives because of the decline in logging, and environmentalists because of the explosion of growth on the margins of the public lands.

One of the most ambitious proposals is here in Montana. It would allow some logging in the Beaverhead and Deerlodge National Forests in the state’s southwest corner in exchange for the designation of new areas within the forests as permanent wilderness.

Some timber companies say that gaining conservationists as allies may be the only way to get back into the national forests, and so stay in business. But both sides say that success will require a turn of the historical momentum against logging in the West that began in the early ’90s.

A court decision in 1991 involving the northern spotted owl required the Forest Service to manage for more than just timber production. The national forests in the northern Rockies constricted logging, fostering expansion in other forest areas like the South.

“If there’s anything the industry should have learned over the years, it’s that we can’t do this by ourselves,” said Gordy Sanders, the resource manager at Pyramid Mountain Lumber, one of the mill operators involved in the Beaverhead and Deerlodge negotiations.

Many environmentalists say they have come to realize that cutting down trees, if done responsibly, is not the worst thing that can happen to a forest, when the alternative is selling the land to people who want to build houses.

Stoltze Land and Lumber, for example, which owns about 36,000 acres near the border of Glacier National Park, has said that the failure of the logging industry would leave the company no option but to sell land into the booming development market.

That prospect chills the blood of people like Anne Dahl, the director of the Swan Valley Ecosystem Center, a conservation and education group.

“I’m a former tree hugger who was opposed to everything, every timber sale,” Ms. Dahl said, “but now I see that the worst thing you can do is lose it all to development.”

Other new partnerships are emerging. Last year, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian tribes, which have a reservation south of Whitefish, joined with conservationists to buy a square mile of land from Plum Creek that was deemed crucial to the endangered bull trout.

The tribes chipped in $4.8 million, half the purchase price, and the Trust for Public Lands put together the other half. The two parties recently completed a plan to manage the property jointly, said the Salish and Kootenai tribal chairman, James Steele Jr.

Plum Creek, based in Seattle, changed its corporate structure in 1999 to become a real estate investment trust. Some Plum Creek property has been bought by conservation groups, including about 68,000 acres in the Blackfoot Valley northwest of Helena. Negotiations continue for more conservation sales, with money surging into funds organized by groups like the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Lands.

Mr. Holley, the Plum Creek executive, said that his company was committed to both the timber and real estate businesses, but that only a small percentage of its land, perhaps 30,000 acres or so, had the combination of attractions — proximity to public lands but also to other amenities, like shopping and restaurants — to make sale for development feasible.

The Forest Service, meanwhile, is struggling to find its own balance. A spokesman for the agency said that the national forests across the West were increasingly tilting toward recreation and away from logging. But the growth in population on the forests’ edge also means more need than ever to thin the trees, through some logging, if only for wildfire protection.

Tom Tidwell, the regional forester for 25 million acres of national forest that includes Montana, northern Idaho, North Dakota and part of South Dakota, said the Forest Service was eager to keep timber companies in business to help with the thinning.

“We’re more in the need of the industry,” Mr. Tidwell said. “It’s essential that we have someone to do that work so that taxpayers don’t have to pay for it.”

One broiling and unresolved issue is who gets to use the land as it changes hands.

Most private timber tracts in the West, including those owned by Plum Creek, have traditionally been open to recreational use, treated as public entry ways into the vast national forests, grasslands and wilderness areas that in Montana alone add up to nearly 46,000 square miles, about the size of New York State. But in many places, the new owners are throwing up no trespassing signs and fences, blocking what generations of residents across the West have taken for granted — open and beckoning access into the woods to fish, hunt and camp.

“Part of our character is that we have so much big sky and open country,” said Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a Democrat who has publicly sparred with Plum Creek about its land sales. “We’re going to have to be creative. There’s no textbook written on how to do this.”

Profile: Brian Schweitzer, Democratic Governor of Montana

The NYT reports:
It’s fun being governor of Montana. Just watch Brian Schweitzer bouncing around the streets of Helena in the passenger seat of the state’s official S.U.V., fumbling with wires, trying to stick the flashing police light on the roof. When he spots some legislators on the sidewalk, he blasts them with the siren, then summons them by name on the loudspeaker. The men jump, and the governor tumbles out of the car, doubled in laughter, giving everyone a bear hug or a high-five or a soft slap on the cheek. Schweitzer, a Democrat in his first term, marches into a barroom in blue jeans and cowboy boots and a beaded bolo tie, and his border collie, Jag, leaps out of the vehicle and follows him in. The governor throws back a few pints of the local brew and introduces himself to everyone in the place, down to the servers and a small girl stuck there with her parents. He takes time from the backslapping to poach cubes of cheese from the snack platter and sneak them to the girl, who is now chasing his dog around the bar. “This is how you make friends with Jag,” he advises her. “Just hold it in your hand and let him take it.”

As soon as Schweitzer was elected in 2004 — the same night that George W. Bush carried Montana by 20 percentage points — pundits began declaring him the future of the Democratic Party. Never mind that it was his first elected office: the 51-year-old farmer and irrigation contractor had folksy charm and true-grit swagger. He shot guns, rode horses, took his dog to work and decimated his opponents with off-the-cuff one-liners heavy on the bull-and-horse metaphors. He didn’t act like a Democrat, in other words, and to many Democrats, reeling from consecutive losses to Bush, that seemed like a pretty good thing.

Schweitzer’s grandparents were homesteaders who immigrated to Montana from Ireland and Germany. His parents were ranchers who never completed high school. And until 2000, Schweitzer and his wife, Nancy, were farming in Whitefish and raising their three children. And then, despite the fact that he was a virtual unknown in politics, Schweitzer began a quixotic bid to oust Conrad Burns, a two-term incumbent Republican senator. To the surprise of Montana’s political class, he came within four percentage points of succeeding. Almost immediately, he began campaigning for what would be an open governor’s seat. Even after choosing a Republican as his running mate, he thumped his primary opponent by a 52-point margin, then won the general election by four points.

Within months of his election, bloggers were clamoring for a presidential run, and his popularity transcended the wonk journals to include coronation as “Hot Governor” by Rolling Stone magazine, while “60 Minutes” called him the Coal Cowboy. On camera he persuaded Lesley Stahl to take a whiff from a vial of diesel fuel synthesized from coal — a product that Schweitzer claims will not only fill Montana’s coffers but also help end the nation’s dependence on foreign oil peddled by “sheiks, rats, crooks, dictators.”

Schweitzer’s “Montana miracle,” in which Democrats took back the governor’s seat after 16 years and ended 12 years of Republican majorities in both state chambers, has been cited as evidence that the Republican bastions in the Western states are losing ground to a new, Democratic brand of libertarian-tinged prairie populism. No fewer than four recent books by Democratic strategists have mentioned Schweitzer as the kind of guy Democrats need to win back rural America. A fifth book, Tom Schaller’s “Whistling Past Dixie,” published earlier this month, also singles out Schweitzer and makes the previously heretical claim that the Democrats’ future lies in ignoring the South and embracing the West and Midwest, where voters are less evangelical and more independent.

“He’s one of the new stars in the party,” Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association, told me recently. “We’re highlighting him wherever we can.” Indeed, just 54 days into his term, Schweitzer was chosen to deliver the Democrats’ weekly radio address, and he has been attracting notice from the party faithful ever since — like when he compared the president to a shifty cattle auctioneer hawking lousy bulls to dubious ranchers.

Six-foot-two and a beefy 205 pounds, Schweitzer has seized the heartland imagery generally monopolized by Republicans. “Schweitzer is the antithesis of the Democrat stereotype,” Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of dailykos.com, the partisan Democratic blog, told me. “Too many Democrats look like targets for the school bully. Schweitzer is a tough guy. And people like guys who will bar-fight their way across a state.”

Schweitzer veers right on many economic and social issues: he opposes gun control, favors the death penalty and preaches about lowering taxes and balancing budgets. At the same time, he leans left on some issues that matter to progressives: championing energy conservation and environmental regulation, opposing governmental restrictions on abortion and criticizing free-trade deals. “He’s as much a prairie centrist as he is a prairie populist,” Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council told me. Schweitzer has the ability to reduce a complicated issue to a few sharp lines, reframing it with themes of patriotism and underdog know-how. “I was a critic of Nafta, I was a critic of Cafta and I’ll be a critic of Shafta,” he says of free-trade agreements, long the hobgoblin of even the most articulate liberal politicians. “Why is it that America supposedly creates the best businessmen in the world, but when we go to the table with the third world, we come away losers?”

The Democrats’ enthusiasm for their new hero seemed to overlook the fact that the governor of a state as sparsely populated as Montana simply does not wield a lot of national clout. Schweitzer governs fewer than a million people, in a state with a single Congressional representative, only three electoral votes and a Legislature that meets for just 90 days, every other year. Indeed, Schweitzer’s national celebrity has less to do with the way he has governed and more to do with Democrats’ perception — or their hope — that he is leading a Western resurgence.

The elections next month will test that theory. Schweitzer has been campaigning for the two Western Democrats best poised to replace powerful Republicans. In Montana, a populist farmer named Jon Tester is posing a serious challenge to Senator Conrad Burns, whose close ties to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff have made him an attractive target for Democrats trying to paint the Republicans as corrupt insiders. A Tester victory would solidify Montana as a Democratic stronghold, marking the first time since 1989 that the state’s two senators and governor were all Democrats. (Montana’s other senator, Max Baucus, a Democrat, has held his seat since 1978.) In Colorado, meanwhile, Schweitzer has been stumping for Bill Ritter, the former Denver district attorney, who grew up on a farm with 11 brothers and sisters, began working construction at age 14 and is now running for governor. A Ritter win would complete what Schweitzer calls a “blue bridge from Alberta to Mexico,” a string of Democratic governorships stretching across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona — states that all broke for Bush in 2004.

Some of this has to do with demographics. In the last three decades, professional and service jobs have boomed in the Rocky Mountain states, and farming and mining jobs have not; those two sectors, once the mainstay of the region, now make up just 5 percent of all jobs. In Nevada, Arizona and Colorado, a sharp rise in the Hispanic population in the last decade may also have helped tilt the voting base to the left. But Governor Schweitzer says he believes that his success points to something more significant. “Is it that the population in the West is trending toward the traditional Democratic Party?” Schweitzer asked. “Or is it possible that some leaders in the Rocky Mountains are on the vanguard of realigning what the Democrats stand for?”

The Interior West has long been seen by Democrats on election night as simply a disheartening wall of big red blocks. Idaho, Utah and Wyoming haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Montana, Colorado and Arizona have all gone Republican in 9 of the last 10 presidential elections. But below the surface, the map of the West is slowly becoming a little less red and a little more blue. In 2000, Democrats had not a single governor in the interior West states; now they have four. Democrats have gradually been picking up House seats, too. In 1996, they won 4 of 24 House seats in the region. But they’ve managed to pick up 1 or 2 seats in each of the last four elections and have now clawed their way up to 8 of 28. In 2004, the party’s only bright spot besides Montana was Colorado, where Ken Salazar won a Republican Senate seat; his brother, John, picked up a House seat; and the Democrats took control of both state chambers.

“The pan-Western states — in an arc from Ohio, west to Montana and south to Arizona — are where the low-hanging and most-ripe-for-the-plucking electoral fruit for Democrats is to be found,” writes Tom Schaller in “Whistling Past Dixie.” The midterm election outlook seems to support Schaller’s thesis. None of the region’s eight Democratic representatives — the so-called Coyote Caucus — are considered at serious risk in 2006. But 10 of the 20 Republican-held seats are included in the list of 56 potential Democratic pickups compiled by Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. The Democratic Senate candidate in Arizona is putting up a surprising fight against the Republican incumbent, and the race for Nevada governor, an open seat vacated by a Republican, is listed by the Cook Report, an influential Washington political newsletter, as a tossup.

Local Democrats portray this trend as a grass-roots, homegrown phenomenon. “These advances were not the results of any national organization,” Jim Farrell, executive director of the Montana Democratic Party, told me, “but of the emergence of great local leadership like Schweitzer and Salazar. The D.S.C.C.” — the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, led by Charles Schumer of New York — “and other national groups have recognized the potential for gain, but they’re chasing after a train that began rolling in the last two cycles here in the West.”

It would seem to be true that Democrats in Washington long ignored the mountain states. As Pat Williams, a Montana Democrat who served in the House from 1979 to 1996, told me, “In 2000 you literally couldn’t get an Al Gore button in Montana.” But in recent years, the national Democratic Party has made some small but significant organizational shifts to increase the West’s political brawn. In August, the Democratic National Committee inserted a Nevada caucus into the 2008 presidential primary schedule, between Iowa and New Hampshire, in recognition that the Southwest is the nation’s fastest-growing region. The West has also gained influence through the elevation of Senator Harry Reid, a pro-gun, pro-life Nevada Mormon, to Senate minority leader. Democrats have chosen Denver as one of two finalists to be host of their 2008 convention (the other is New York). If Denver is selected, it will mark the first time in a century that Democrats have held a convention in the interior West. The D.N.C. has hired as its Northwest political director Brad Martin, who as executive director of the Montana Democratic Party oversaw its 2004 gains, and Howard Dean has dispatched more than 30 staff members to the Western states as part of his “50-state strategy.”

Still, Democrats hasten to assure the region’s notoriously prickly and independent voters that the national party’s new Western focus doesn’t mean that Washington will exercise any control over candidates in the region. “We’re not trying to be a top-down organization like the Republicans,” says Karen Finney, spokeswoman of the D.N.C. In the West, of course, being seen as refusing to take orders is a way to demonstrate your frontier spirit. Williams offers this advice to any Western candidate wondering whether to employ a regional strategy: “If it doesn’t exist, create it. And then be against it.”

As fertile as the West may seem for Democrats, some in the party remain skeptical that it matters much. “The problem with the Democrats is that they can’t count,” Dave (Mudcat) Saunders, a Democratic campaign strategist, told me. Saunders’s book, “Foxes in the Henhouse,” argues that the party would be wrong to focus on the West and ignore the South. He notes that 30 percent of the country’s electoral votes come from the South, and that by 2025 that percentage will be 40. “Georgia and Florida have as many votes as all the West put together,” Saunders points out.

Montana Republicans don’t concede that the 2004 results show a Democratic trend in Montana — much less the rest of the West. Roy Brown, the leader of the Republican caucus in the statehouse, says that the Democrats’ pickup of seats in the Legislature was not due to a sea change in the electorate but a result of gerrymandering perpetrated by a Montana Supreme Court that is “in bed with the Democrats.” Although Montana does not require voters to identify party affiliation, Brown estimates that 40 percent are Republicans, 35 percent are Democrats and 25 percent are independents. He concedes that in recent years the independents have been leaning toward the Democrats, but he says that’s not a consequence of a true shift in voter attitudes but a result of a “filter-down” effect from unpopular Republican candidates at the top of the ticket. (Schweitzer’s Republican predecessor famously declared herself a “lap dog of industry.”) In any event, the Democrats’ success in 2004 was not an aberration; the party had been steadily gaining seats in the state chambers for the previous three elections.

Schweitzer agrees that Democrats should be careful about trying to extrapolate Montana’s political trends to other states. “Montana ought not serve as a metaphor for the entire West,” he told me. Indeed, Montana is the West’s answer to New Hampshire: independent, contrary and unpredictable. Its demographic trends do not match that of the Southwest. The state’s population is growing, but not skyrocketing the way it is in Arizona and Nevada, and with no city larger than 100,000 residents, Montana essentially does not have suburbs or exurbs like those spreading around Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver. Hispanics account for less than 3 percent of the population; Montana’s most sizable ethnic minority is Native American, at 6 percent of the population. And the state’s voters have always been less conservative than their neighbors in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. While it’s true that Montanans voted for a Democratic president only twice in the past 50 years, they’ve often elected Democrats to the House and Senate. In fact, Max Baucus’s Senate seat has been held by a Democrat since 1913. The meaning of the 2004 race is further complicated by the fact that Schweitzer chose a Republican — albeit a moderate of the Jim Jeffords variety — as his running mate.

Within the state, politics have historically been split between east and west. Western Montana, with two college towns, Missoula and Bozeman; the unionized mining town Butte; and the capital, Helena, tends to vote more like the liberal Pacific Northwest. The east is more like the Great Plains, with vast ranches, farms, strip mines and oil fields. When the state had two Congressional districts (they were folded into one in 1993), the western one was consistently held by a Democrat and the eastern one by a Republican. According to David Sirota, who was a strategist for Schweitzer in both 2000 and 2004 and who now lives in Helena, the swing vote in the state is in and around Billings, the state’s largest city. (“It is Yellowstone County that is Montana’s own Ohio,” he says, “and Billings the state’s Columbus.”) But unlike the rest of the nation, where swing voters are generally characterized as socially conservative suburbanites, Sirota says that many Montana swing voters are rural and libertarian.

Marc Racicot, who served two terms as Montana’s governor before he went on to be chairman of the Republican National Committee and President Bush’s 2004 campaign committee, says his fellow Montanans are unpredictable voters. “You simply can’t classify them,” he told me, pointing out that in 2004 they simultaneously voted to ban gay marriage and to legalize medical marijuana. “They are conservative in some ways, but ruggedly independent and populist in others. Party affiliation isn’t necessarily the dominant characteristic they consider.” Montanans are more mistrustful of large institutions like government and corporations than their counterparts on the coasts, while less religious than the South. Fifty-three percent of Montanans say they are pro-abortion rights. In foreign policy they can be rather isolationist: a poll in September showed that Montanans break with the national trend and rank the economy as more important than national security or the Iraq war. They take a libertarian approach to homeland security that is rarely heard nationally; Jon Tester, in a recent debate, said, “With things like the Patriot Act, we’d damn well better keep our guns.” And, contrary to the myth that Westerners are opposed to all environmental regulation, they tend to be conservationists. About 60 percent of Montanans favored the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protected land from logging; it was signed by Bill Clinton and overturned by George W. Bush. Bush’s recent plan to auction off public lands was so unpopular in Montana that even Conrad Burns opposed it.

Montana’s populist streak dates back more than a century to the mining labor movement, and it surfaced again in 1992, when Ross Perot captured more than a quarter of the vote, allowing Clinton to win the state. As the Republicans honed their populist message in the 1990’s, their fortunes improved in Montana. Now, some say, the tide is turning. “The appeal of populism never changed,” Sirota says. “The parties changed. The Republicans were the populists. Now the Democrats have learned that they can be populists, too.”

It was a sunny day in June, and Brian Schweitzer and Max Baucus were flanked by Cessnas and helicopters, rallying with Jon Tester. Political rallies in other states might take place in hotel ballrooms; here in Montana everyone was gathered in an aircraft hangar outside Missoula. The place smelled like jet fuel. Corralling the top-ticket Montana Democrats in one place can resemble a “Bonanza” cast reunion, albeit with two Hosses and no Little Joe. Tester is a third-generation wheat farmer, president of the State Senate and a lumbering tank of a guy with a big gut and a flattop haircut. You want prairie authenticity? Have Tester show you his hand with just a thumb and a pinkie; the other three fingers were chopped off in a meat grinder when he was a boy. Tester, a progressive type, ran in the primary against a better-financed centrist, a career politician supported by the Democratic Leadership Council, and as soon as he won, Schweitzer leapt in to claim him as a brother. Onstage at the airport, Schweitzer played the down-home card. “Jon’s grandparents homesteaded just 20 miles from my grandparents,” he hollered, to a roar of approval from the hangar. “He and I were born in the same tiny hospital, up in Havre!”

Other than the fact that they grew up on farms, it’s not immediately clear what unites Schweitzer and Tester, Ritter and the Salazars. With his outspoken criticism of the war in Iraq — “I was very public before we went in that it was a bad idea, and history has borne that out,” he told me — Schweitzer has become a hero to progressives, while Ken Salazar has infuriated liberals with his support of Alberto Gonzalez’s nomination for attorney general and his endorsement of Joe Lieberman’s independent re-election bid. Governor Richardson of New Mexico suggests that such differences are evidence that the movement has no overarching strategy. “It’s happening from the bottom up,” he told me. “This is a natural evolution. It’s no grand design.” Or maybe it’s that the region’s Democrats simply don’t have many core beliefs in common. Schweitzer remains an iconoclast; he says he supported John McCain’s presidential bid in 2000, though he has since soured on McCain because of the way he has courted the religious right, and he says he is now intrigued by the possibility of a presidential run by Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, in 2008. “If he gets the nomination, I might support him,” Schweitzer told me.

Much of Schweitzer’s attraction to voters lies in the fact that he doesn’t seem like a politician. “I’m just a rancher who ended up governor of Montana,” he likes to say. But Schweitzer is not a politician only in the sense that the young Cassius Clay was not a boxer; by the time his opponent realized he’d been hit, he was already on the mat. And since it’s accepted in the West that politicians are generally not to be trusted, Schweitzer’s greatest talent may be his endless insistence that he’s not one, all the while winning your vote and changing your opinion to agree with his. Which is, of course, what a politician does. His success is not the happy accident of a novice or a rube or a cowpoke who happened to ride his donkey into the halls of power — but rather the work of an expert, a virtuoso or, perhaps, a natural.

Besides getting elected and getting on television, what has Schweitzer actually accomplished? Much of the attention he has received came from positions he has taken on national issues: writing an Op-Ed for The Times about the miracle of coal-to-gas liquefaction, or requesting that President Bush return the Montana National Guardsmen from Iraq to fight summer forest fires. His agenda for his first legislative session was hardly radical: it included an increase in education financing, setting a goal to produce more wind power and a tax-reform bill that favored small business over big by eliminating the tax on business equipment valued at less than $20,000, while withdrawing a pending cut on more expensive equipment. He introduced an ultimately unsuccessful plan to prevent government officials from moving directly into lobbying jobs. Still, Schweitzer bristles at the suggestion that he was not sufficiently tested by his first session. “I had 90 days to pass my agenda,” he told me. “It was my first day on the job, and I was working with lobbyists and legislators who’d been there for years. We had a State Assembly that was deadlocked. But I pushed through the most progressive legislative agenda in the country. It was not easy. I took on the lobbyists. I wrestled them to the ground, and now I’m kicking them in the ribs.”

Despite the boots and bluster, at his core Brian Schweitzer is something of a policy wonk and a science whiz. He says he sleeps no more than five hours a night, and he is at his computer well before dawn, consuming a host of newspapers and a string of political blogs. His true passion is energy independence. On his desk is a contraption of tubes and coils that, as he enthusiastically explains, convert sunlight into hydrogen. In addition to his horsemanship and riflery, Schweitzer likes to tinker with gadgets, and he holds degrees in both soil science and agronomy. He will preach to anyone who will listen about the Fischer-Tropsch process of coal liquefaction, or about his recent switch from a Tahoe S.U.V. to a biodiesel Volkswagen Jetta.

Schweitzer fancies that he will solve the energy crisis the Montana way, which is to say, with ethanol and syn-fuels and wind power, all readily available in a state that has more grain, coal and wind than it does people. He says he believes that he is setting an example for the rest of the world, and that tends to infuse even the most mundane details of his legislative work with a certain fervor.

When I was visiting with Schweitzer one day during the legislative session, an aide rushed into his office with news that a group of Democratic state representatives from the Great Falls area were threatening to withdraw their support from the governor’s ethanol bill. Schweitzer was leaning back in his chair, beneath an oil painting of a Native American woman playing a flute, beside a window opening onto a view of snow-covered mountains. If Schweitzer is, as his critics contend, mostly a showman, he has chosen the perfect stage. Helena’s domed State Capitol is a transcendent gallery of marble columns and stained-glass atria, a temple so sincere in its exultation of frontier democracy that, for the cynical, it may resemble a Frank Capra movie version of government more than it resembles the real thing. Citizens wander freely in the corridors of power and, from the Senate gallery, can observe their lawmakers beneath frescoes of Lewis and Clark meeting Sacagawea, and of General Custer about to take a dagger to the gut at Little Bighorn.

The Great Falls representatives refused to come meet Schweitzer in the governor’s office — located about 800 steps from their chamber — because they were upset that the governor canceled a meeting with them earlier that day. “That’s it,” Schweitzer said, leaping up. “I’m taking ’em to the woodshed.” In an instant he was stomping down the corridor to the rotunda, his dog at his heels, and charging up the staircase to the House chamber. The governor corralled the Great Falls representatives in a meeting room and listened to their grievances. He leaned forward intently, his head bobbing almost imperceptibly, his eyes wide open and blinking in a strict cadence, receiving and processing data as if it were an electrical current. He clutched the edge of the table, and I suspected that if he let go, the rotors spinning in his skull would have broken the pull of gravity and sent him spiraling into orbit.

Sufficiently charged, the governor whirred into action. His monologue combined pep talk and sales pitch, threats and promises, science lecture and economic briefing. He spoke at length on the difference between malt barley and high-protein wheat, and on the profit margin of ethanol refineries, pounding his finger on the tabletop for emphasis. He went on uninterrupted for seven minutes, and when the fusillade was over, one of the representatives voiced a small objection from an industry lobbyist that Montana wheat would make for low-grade ethanol.

“Now that,” said the governor, slapping the table in triumph, almost evangelically, as if the Republic itself depended on this vote, “that sounds like somebody who didn’t take a single class in agronomy!”

Later that day, everyone at the meeting voted yes on ethanol, and in the evenly split House, the bill passed 52-48.

Hungry and emboldened, Democrats are already looking past 2006. A few stalwart Western Republicans who have been in the Senate since the Nixon years are rumored to be contemplating retirement in 2008. Pete Domenici of New Mexico will be 76, and Ted Stevens of Alaska will be 84. In Colorado, Democrats are so eager to oust Senator Wayne Allard that Representative Mark Udall has declared his candidacy a full three years before the election. Udall comes from the political dynasty that has spawned an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a handful of Democratic congressmen, and as a world-class mountaineer who says he is the only member of Congress to have made an attempt on Mount Everest, he fits the bill of an iconic Westerner.

As Democrats look to Montana to try to figure out how to replicate Governor Schweitzer’s success, they can’t help noticing one recent poll number: in August, 66 percent of Montana Republicans said they approved of Schweitzer, the same portion who said they approved of Conrad Burns, their own party’s incumbent senator. It may be that this sort of popularity comes only to a larger-than-life personality like Schweitzer.

Democrats will be wise not to try to replicate Schweitzer himself. When non-Schweitzers try to act like Schweitzer, it usually doesn’t work. In his book, Schaller recalls “campaign images of Al Gore wearing cowboy boots with his belt-clipped Blackberry, or a barn-jacket-clad John Kerry buying a goose-hunting license.” Schaller goes on to write that these gestures force “liberals to avert their eyes in horror, while conservatives look on from afar with a mixture of disdain and disbelief.”

As for Schweitzer’s own future plans, he dismisses questions about further political ambitions with one of his trademark similes — something about having spent more days in a saddle than having been governor. Nonetheless, the scope of his battle is larger than Montana. In addition to campaigning for Jon Tester in Montana and Bill Ritter in Colorado, he also stumped recently at a fund-raiser in Jackson Hole, Wyo., for a singularly non-Western candidate: Eliot Spitzer of New York.