Jon Tester, a Democrat, was elected Montana’s junior senator in 2006. He grew up in a farming family, on the same prairie land his grandparents homesteaded almost a century ago near the small town of Big Sandy, home of Big Bud 747, the largest farm tractor in the world. His family ran a custom butcher shop behind their barn; at the age of 9 Tester lost three fingers from his left hand in a meat grinder. The accident, he says, changed him from a saxophone player to a trumpet player. He earned a music degree from the University of Great Falls and later taught music at a local elementary school before devoting himself to farming. He has raised wheat, hay, alfalfa, barley, buckwheat, lentils, millet, and peas and also served on the local Soil Conservation Service Committee. He then switched to organic farming. He told Esquire, “I watched neighbor after neighbor sell out, and a fair number of them were bigger than we were. In the eighties, we realized we had to do something to add value to our product, to make it more marketable, to get a better price for it. That’s when we made the conversion to organic. It’s been a blessing for us. Before we converted, when we sprayed weeds, I just planned on being sick for about a week.” He is still at it, spending four days of the August 2010 recess harvesting wheat. Read More
Jon Tester, a Democrat, was elected Montana’s junior senator in 2006. He grew up in a farming family, on the same prairie land his grandparents homesteaded almost a century ago near the small town of Big Sandy, home of Big Bud 747, the largest farm tractor in the world. His family ran a custom butcher shop behind their barn; at the age of 9 Tester lost three fingers from his left hand in a meat grinder. The accident, he says, changed him from a saxophone player to a trumpet player. He earned a music degree from the University of Great Falls and later taught music at a local elementary school before devoting himself to farming. He has raised wheat, hay, alfalfa, barley, buckwheat, lentils, millet, and peas and also served on the local Soil Conservation Service Committee. He then switched to organic farming. He told Esquire, “I watched neighbor after neighbor sell out, and a fair number of them were bigger than we were. In the eighties, we realized we had to do something to add value to our product, to make it more marketable, to get a better price for it. That’s when we made the conversion to organic. It’s been a blessing for us. Before we converted, when we sprayed weeds, I just planned on being sick for about a week.” He is still at it, spending four days of the August 2010 recess harvesting wheat.
Tester’s political career began on the Big Sandy school board, where he served for a decade. In 1998, when his neighbor, a Republican state senator, decided not to run for re-election, Tester ran for the seat and won. In 2002, he was chosen as minority leader and he became Senate president in 2005 after Democrats won a majority. In that role, he helped pass a budget that cut taxes for small businesses and middle-class families while increasing funding for public education. When the 2005 legislative session adjourned, Tester announced he would challenge three-term Republican Sen. Conrad Burns. Tester was one of five Democrats seeking the party nomination; his only real opposition came from two-term state Auditor John Morrison, a former president of the Montana Trial Lawyers Association and the son of a state Supreme Court justice. He outspent Tester nearly 2-to-1. But in a campaign that focused on Burns’ ethics, Morrison was weakened by the disclosure that he had an extramarital affair in 1998 with the fiancée of a businessman who was later investigated by the auditor’s office. This undercut claims that Morrison was the more electable candidate. Running as an unabashed populist, Tester gained support from Daily Kos and other left-wing Internet activists, and in Montana he assembled a formidable grass roots operation with hundreds of volunteers. He beat Morrison 61%-35%.
Tester was taking on the only Republican senator Montana voters had ever re-elected. But by 2006, the 71-year-old conservative incumbent had two serious problems. The first was his connection to disgraced and later convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He was the largest congressional recipient of campaign donations from Abramoff’s clients, and he faced campaign accusations that he “sold his vote” and betrayed Montana’s American Indians population by earmarking funds for Abramoff’s Indian clients in other states. Tester argued that Burns was not the same down-to-earth Westerner Montanans had sent to Washington 18 years earlier.
Burns’ second handicap was a gaffe-prone style, ill-suited for the YouTube era. In 2006, while discussing the war on terrorism, he spoke of enemies who “drive taxicabs in the daytime and kill at night.” In July, he admonished a group of firefighters for doing a “piss-poor job” of battling a wildfire, and a month later, referred to his handyman as a “nice little Guatemalan man” and joked about the man’s immigration status. “I can self-destruct in one sentence,” he admitted. “Sometimes in one word.” In the past, such blunders might have been overlooked as part of Burns’ folksy appeal, but they proved harder to dismiss when memorialized on video. This was a bare-knuckled campaign. Burns spent $8.5 million, $3 million more than Tester, and argued that Tester was too liberal for Montana because of his opposition to the Bush-era PATRIOT anti-terrorism law, his links to “radical environmentalists” and left-wing bloggers. But Tester was not so easily caricatured. His signature $8 flattop haircut, highlighted in a television ad filmed at the Riverview Barbershop in Great Falls, his down-to-earth demeanor (He’s fond of saying, “You have two ears and one mouth; act accordingly.”), his beefy farmer’s build, and his agricultural background worked to temper the criticism. He was helped by popular Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who taped an ad saying, “Senator Burns and his crooked pals in Washington are lying about my friend Jon Tester.”
The race was decided by just 3,562 votes. Burns carried 41 of 56 counties, including Yellowstone County, which includes Billings, the state’s largest city. But Tester prevailed in several large counties including Cascade (Great Falls), Lewis and Clark (Helena) and Missoula (home of the University of Montana), carrying the latter nearly 2-1.
In Washington, Democrats hailed Tester’s victory as a signal of a new political direction in the Mountain West. His distinctive look—he’s tall, barrel-chested, and wears cowboy boots—won him immediate notice in the Senate, as did his practice of prominently posting his daily schedule on the Internet, a Senate first. Arriving in Washington, Tester stressed the importance of transparency and accountability in government, thus distancing himself from the questionable practices that hurt his predecessor. He strongly supported the Senate’s 2007 ethics bill and in 2008 he voluntarily asked a retired Montana Supreme Court justice to conduct a comprehensive ethics audit of his office. He also joined a group of senators seeking to ban secret holds on legislation and nominations, a longtime Senate practice, and he co-sponsored a Republican bill to ban former members of Congress from ever lobbying.
Tester voted for Democratic measures seeking to end the Iraq war. He joined Democrats Jim Webb of Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri in an amendment to the defense authorization to establish a bipartisan commission to oversee private contractors in Iraq. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law but attached a signing statement stipulating he felt justified in ignoring the amendment, which did not sit well with Tester. “For the president to say, you know, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea and I can do that because I’m king,’ is a big mistake,” he said.
On the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, Tester worked on the credit card regulation act signed into law in 2009, banning certain fees and deadlines and providing an extra week for paying bills, and in May 2010, he sponsored a successful amendment requiring large banks to pay higher Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fees. On other major issues, Tester co-sponsored with Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona an amendment to repeal the District of Columbia’s gun control laws, which effectively stopped legislation to give D.C. a voting representative in Congress. In December 2010, he aroused the ire of left-wing bloggers when he voted against the DREAM Act, which would provide a path for citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants who attend college or serve in the military. Tester said, “Illegal immigration is a critical problem facing our country, but amnesty is not the solution. I do not support legislation that provides a path for citizenship for anyone in this country illegally.” The Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas, a staunch Tester backer in 2006, said he would do whatever he could to defeat him in 2012. Montana has one of the lowest percentages of immigrants, legal or illegal, of any state.
On issues important to Montana, Tester has promoted carbon-capture and sequestration technology as a feasible method of clean-energy production that could lead to the development of the large coal reserves in Montana, “the Saudi Arabia of coal,” as he put it. In 2009, he sponsored a bill to designate 660,000 acres of wilderness land, and to allow logging in portions of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Kootenai national forests, an unusual combination that he said was suggested by a local coalition of timber companies and environmental groups. But Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., opposed the logging provisions as well as others allowing military helicopter landings and motorized vehicles in portions of the proposed wilderness area. Tester drafted a revision, but insisted on the logging allowances, and the bill stalled.
Tester holds one of the 23 Democratic seats up in 2012, and one that Republicans were targeting in early 2011. Republican Denny Rehberg, Montana’s sole House member, announced in February 2011 he would run against Tester. Rehberg in 1996 gave Democratic Sen. Max Baucus his closest race ever, losing by just 50%-45%.
