Who's Guaranteeing The Safety Of China's Food For Import?

The NYTimes reports:


After weeks of insisting that food here is largely safe, regulators in China said Tuesday that they had recently closed 180 food plants and that inspectors had uncovered more than 23,000 food safety violations.

The nationwide crackdown, which the government said began last December, also found that many small food makers were using industrial chemicals, banned dyes and other illegal ingredients in things like candy and seafood.

The announcement came as part of an overhaul of food safety regulations after a series of international food scares involving Chinese exports.

The country’s exports of contaminated ingredients for animal feed earlier this year led to one of the largest pet food recalls in American history.

Tainted animal feed ingredients also leached into American meat and fish supplies, and problems with contaminated fish and other food have been reported in other parts of Asia and in Europe.

China has strongly denied that its food exports are hazardous and has seemingly retaliated against criticisms in recent weeks by seizing American and European imports.

This week, China said it had impounded two shipments, of orange pulp and apricots, from the United States because they contained “excessive amounts of bacteria and mold.”

Earlier this year, regulators blocked imports of Evian water from France, saying bacteria levels in the water exceeded national standards.

Still, the government has moved aggressively in recent months to enforce food safety regulations and to weed out fake or contaminated food products.

Tuesday’s announcement, which appeared on the Web site of the country’s top food-quality watchdog, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, has intensified concerns about rampant fraud in the food industry here.

Regulators said an investigation involving 33,000 law enforcement officials found illegal food-production and meat-processing operations, fake soy sauce and the use of banned food additives.

“These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department, told the state-run media. China Daily, the nation’s English-language newspaper, said industrial chemicals not intended for use in foods had been found in products as diverse as candy, pickles and seafood. Among the substances were dyes, mineral oils, paraffin, formaldehyde and malachite green, a chemical primarily used as a dye but also used as a topical antiseptic or treatment for parasites and infections in fish.

Regulators said they also learned that the potentially toxic chemicals sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid were being used to process shark fin and ox tendon.

These industrial chemicals are often corrosive, and are used in drain cleaners, detergent, fertilizer and surfboard wax, among other products.

Such discoveries have become common in China. In 2005, officials in south China found a company repackaging food waste and shipping it to 10 other regions. And just last week, officials said a company in Anhui Province, not far from Shanghai, was selling a two-year-old rice dumpling mix as fresh, according to the state-controlled media.

Experts here say that the country’s food regulations are not being enforced and that small-business men are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to increase profit.

Corruption and bribery are also part of the food and drug industry here.

The former head of the food and drug watchdog agency was recently sentenced to death for accepting bribes and approving the licensing of substandard drugs. And now, a Ministry of Agriculture official is on trial in Beijing for accepting bribes in exchange for endorsing food products.

But not all the problems stem from corruption or malfeasance. A. T. Kearney, an international management consulting firm, issued a report this week saying that one cause of food safety problems in China was inadequate logistics systems and a lack of cold storage.

The firm said China needed to invest about $100 billion over the next 10 years to upgrade its logistics and refrigeration abilities and to put new standards into effect.

In China, the study said, there are only about 30,000 refrigerated trucks for transporting food; the United States has about 280,000.

“In the entire supply chain there’s no common standard or world-class standard,” said Zhang Bing, who helped prepare the study. “There are a lot of things contributing to the food safety problem. There are companies putting chemicals into food. But there’s also a lot of spoilage.”

Bush's Mexico-Domiciled Trucks Plan Flunks Safety Rules

Public Citizen reports:

The Bush administration is continuing to ignore the law and failing to protect the public as it barrels ahead with a pilot project allowing trucks from Mexico to travel throughout the United States, even though the public disapproves of the plan, according to new data released today by safety advocates.

Organizations representing highway and truck safety groups, labor, and independent truck drivers joined members of Congress today to criticize the Bush administration for ignoring federal safety laws concerning the implementation of a pilot program allowing trucks from Mexico to travel throughout the United States.

The groups – including Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Public Citizen and the Truck Safety Coalition – released an analysis of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) program [.pdf] showing the agency failing to comply with federal law. They also released a recent opinion poll [.pdf] revealing the public’s opposition to the plan. Overall, the groups conclude, the Department of Transportation receives a failing grade [.pdf] on the pilot program.

About the “Pilot Program”
In February, the administration announced plans to conduct a “pilot program” allowing up to 1,000 Mexico-domiciled trucks to travel beyond the current border zones. In 2001, Congress required the administration to put a premium on upgrading inspection facilities, computer databases, and other safety-related requirements before opening the southern border for long-haul trucks. The Bush administration has still not finished implementing the safety requirements in that law, but decided this year to rush ahead with the pilot program in an attempt to open the border.

Hearings in the U.S. House and Senate, featuring testimony from Advocates and Public Citizen, identified serious safety problems with the program. On May 24, Congress approved provisions in a supplemental Iraq War funding bill to ensure that any pilot program to allow Mexico-domiciled trucks full access to the nation’s highways would not circumvent safety standards or congressional oversight. The provisions ordered the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which is responsible for implementing the administration’s cross-border pilot program, to obey a number of requirements that the agency is still ignoring.

These provisions, signed into law by the president, require:

* the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to follow all applicable rules and regulations concerning the formulation of pilot programs and cross-border trucking;
* Mexico-based trucking companies and trucks to comply with all applicable U.S. laws; and
* the administration to ensure that the operation of these trucks within the United States would not have a negative impact on safety.

The groups today accused the administration of brazenly pressing forward without meeting many of the safety provisions directed by Congress. Less than three weeks after the legislation was signed into law, FMCSA published a notice in the Federal Register on June 8 that in effect declared that the agency had met all of the congressionally mandated safety requirements to open the southern border.

New Report: Continuing Failure to Protect the Public
The report [.pdf] released today, however, identified every provision of law that FMCSA has failed to comply with, including:

* failure to provide sufficient opportunity for public notice and comments;
* failure to provide the public with information about the pilot project;
* failure to comply with the requirements of §350 of the FY2002 DOT Appropriations Act on the safety of cross-border trucking;
* failure to comply with requirements of the pilot program law to test innovative approaches and alternative regulations under 49 USC §31315(c);
* failure of FMCSA to keep its promise to check every truck every time for compliance; and
* failure to establish criteria that are subject to monitoring during the pilot program.

The report was released alongside a new poll [.pdf] conducted by the nonpartisan Lake Research Partners, which found:

* A majority of Americans (56 percent) believe the Bush administration’s plan to allow Mexico-domiciled trucks to travel outside the current commercial zone and throughout the United States is dangerous.

* Majority agreement that this is dangerous for U.S. drivers transcends gender, age, political identification and region.

* Notably, self-identified independents (60 percent) are most likely to agree that the Bush proposal is dangerous, though majorities of Democrats (54 percent) and Republicans (58 percent) concur.

Bipartisan legislation included in Section 6901 of the Iraq War supplemental appropriations bill directs the DOT Office of Inspector General to report to Congress on whether or not the federal government is in full compliance with the truck safety law enacted in 2001. Unfortunately, the DOT continues to select parts of that law it wants to obey and those it chooses to ignore.

These include provisions prohibiting cross-border trucking to occur unless the U.S. and Mexico have reached an agreement on hazardous materials, unless there are adequate inspection facilities available for passenger buses and unless there are cures for deficiencies in data systems used to monitor driving violations and convictions of Mexico-domiciled commercial operators.

China to Revise Food and Drug Safety Rules

The NYT reports:

Responding to growing international concerns about tainted food and counterfeit drugs, China said late Tuesday that it was overhauling its food and drug safety regulations and would introduce nationwide inspections.

The announcement, from the State Council, the nation’s highest administrative body, is the strongest signal yet that Beijing is moving to crack down on the sale of dangerous food and medicine and also trying to calm fears that some of its exports pose health problems.

The move follows a series of embarrassing episodes this year involving China’s export of contaminated pet food ingredients and toothpaste. The shipments of tainted pet food ingredients set off one of the largest pet food recalls in United States history.

Last month, an article in The New York Times revealed that at least 100 people had died in Panama after taking medicine containing a toxic chemical called diethylene glycol that had been produced in China and exported as the harmless syrup glycerine.

And in recent weeks, several countries, including the United States, Panama and Nicaragua, recalled or issued warnings about toothpaste made in China because it contained diethylene glycol.

While Beijing has strongly defended the quality and safety of its food and drug exports, and even denied that toothpaste it exported was unsafe, government regulators at the same time have stepped up safety inspections and shut down companies accused of producing unsafe food or counterfeit drugs.

But with pressure growing from regulators in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world, and international food companies expressing concern about the risks of importing Chinese-made food and feed ingredients, Beijing is pushing for a more forceful response to the crisis.

In its announcement on Tuesday, which was posted on a government Web site, China said that the state council had approved a new food and drug safety guarantee system on April 17 and that an outline of the new program was being distributed to government agencies nationwide.

The government said in its announcement that it planned by 2010 to place new controls on food and drug imports and exports, to step up random testing on medicines and have inspection information on 90 percent of all food products.

It said it also planned safety checks on a large majority of food makers and said that regulators would crack down on the sale of counterfeit drugs and medical devices.

The government did not indicate whether it would provide more funds for the efforts or which agencies would carry out the bulk of the functions.

But in announcing the new measures, the government hinted at its weaknesses in enforcement, saying that after five years one goal was that “100 percent of the significant food safety accidents are investigated and dealt with” and that “80 percent of the food that needs to be recalled is recalled.”

A few weeks ago, the government had announced that it was planning to set up a food recall system.

On Tuesday, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, which oversees food and drug exports, also posted statements on its Web site about the issue.

“Recently, our country has had a series of export food problems, and that has triggered a lot of overseas attention about China’s food safety,” said Wei Chuanzhong, deputy director of the agency. “This has put us on high alert, and led us to seriously look into the reasons for the problem.”

Food and drug safety experts have complained for years about an incredibly flawed system that has led to food scares or mass poisonings tied to counterfeit or substandard medicines on the market.

Much of the blame has centered on weak enforcement of the nation’s food and drug regulations, as well as corruption, bribery and a business culture where counterfeiting thrives.

China’s food and drug administration, which is supposed to safeguard the nation’s health, has also been implicated.

Last week, a Chinese court handed down a death sentence against Zheng Xiaoyu, the head of the Food and Drug Administration in China from 1998 to 2005, after he pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption. The government also said that he took bribes to approve drug production licenses and that it was reviewing production licenses the agency had issued.

Some experts say the new food and drug safety program suggests that the nation’s top leaders are taking up the call for reforms and new enforcement measures.

“There’s been concern for a while about food safety in this country, and now that there are growing concerns about China’s international image, the state council has decided to act,” said Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst of Chinese politics who is based in Beijing. “This may be a sign that everyone in the government ought to get in line.”

But the challenges facing China are enormous because its regulatory system is weak and enforcement is particularly difficult, partly because the economy is growing so fast and also because local officials accept bribes and sometimes allow small companies to flout regulations.

Also, regulators here say many exporters of food and medicines are mislabeling goods and shipping them illegally.

Two weeks ago, food and drug safety issues were even on the table in Washington during the strategic economic dialogue hosted by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.

“These are issues China has to deal with over time,” says Rio D. Praaning, secretary general of the Public Advice International Foundation in Belgium, an advisory group that is working on food and drug safety issues around the world. “But we can’t wait. We have interim developments. We have patience, but frankly patience is out the window when people start dying.”

China Food Boss Sentenced To Death

Beijing has pledged tougher inspections amid growing domestic and international alarm over tainted products. Several countries have already imposed bans or voiced concerns about Chinese imports:

United States
Deaths of hundreds of pets blamed on Chinese pet food tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilisers and fireproofing
Mississippi and Alabama banned Chinese catfish after tests found they contained antibiotics

Europe and Japan
Excessive antibiotic or pesticide residues in Chinese shrimp, honey and other products

Hong Kong
Turbot found to contain traces of malachite green - a potential cancer-causing chemical used to treat fungal infections

China
Babies die after being fed fake baby formula
Cancer-causing dyes injected into eggs to make yolks redder
Children given saltwater passed off as rabies vaccine

Al Jazeera reports:
The former head of China's food and drug safety regulatory body has been sentenced to death for corruption.

Zheng Xiaoyu was convicted by a court in Beijing on charges of taking bribes and dereliction of duty, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.
On the same day officials have announced a series of measures for recalling unsafe food products.

The news comes as China's leaders grapple with the fallout from a string of health alerts over toxins in food and other products.
Zheng, 62, headed the watchdog State Food and Drug Administration which sets standards for food and drug safety, from 1998 until he was sacked in 2005.

He was expelled from the ruling Communist party this year after investigators said he abused the administration's approval powers to obtain bribes and illegal profits from drug companies.

Zheng's powers increased substantially in 2002 when the government required all drugs be approved by the agency.

The change resulted in a massive backlog, giving companies a strong incentive to find ways to speed up approvals.

During his trial Zheng was accused of taking up to $780,000 in bribes to approve untested medicines, including an antibiotic that killed at least 10 patients.

His unusually harsh sentence may yet be reduced on appeal.

The last time China sentenced an official of Zheng's rank to death was in 2000, when Hu Changqing, a vice-governor of the eastern Jiangxi province, and Cheng Kejie, a vice-head of the National People's Congress, were executed for taking bribes.

In another case, local media reported that families of Chinese patients killed by a fake medical ingredient maker linked to widespread deaths in Panama have sued the southern Chinese hospital that administered the toxic injections.

They are seeking 20 million yuan ($2.6m) in compensation.

"These incidents have exposed serious problems in the production and distribution of medicines," the Information Times quoted one of the plaintiffs' lawyers as saying in the hearing that began on Monday.

Recall

Beijing has promised to subject all food and drugs to more rigorous inspections amid fears that tainted food scandals could lead to bans on Chinese food products.

Announcing new measures to tackle the problem on Tuesday, the govermment said it would be introducing a food recall system that will focus on "potentially dangerous and unapproved food products," the state-run China Daily newspaper said.

Earlier this month authorities announced the detention of managers from two Chinese firms linked to contaminated pet food sold in the US.

Ingredients used in the pet food had reportedly been tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilisers and flame retardants.

And in recent days the US government has stopped all imports of Chinese toothpaste after reports that some products sold in Australia, the Dominican Republic and Panama were tainted with diethylene glycol, a chemical commonly used in antifreeze and brake fluid.

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.