|
CounterPunch
October
11, 2002
Montana Fusion
Steve Kelly's Wild Run for Congress
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Steve Kelly, the Montana artist and environmentalist,
is running for congress again. This time as a Democrat.
"People talk about fusion politics,
well, I'm it," says Kelly, who has run before both as a
green and a Republican.
Montana is the fourth largest state.
But it has only one congressional seat. The incumbent congressman
is Dennis Rehberg, a bland rightwing Republican. Despite Rehberg's
soft numbers and the Democratic Party's purported drive to reclaim
the House, Kelly, who won the Democratic Party primary in June,
is yet to get a dime of campaign aid from the national Democratic
Party or the State Party.
"I've gotten about $400 from the
Democratic committees at the county level," Kelly says with
a grin. "But I've spent about $200 in gas money driving
around to their meetings. Still it's a 2-to-1 return. That's
not that bad of a ratio. Better than the big enviro groups."
All in all, Kelly expects to spend about
$17,000 dollars in the campaign. By contrast, Rehberg has already
spent more than $300,000 and has access to an even bigger warchest.
Why didn't the DNC pour money into Kelly's
campaign? After all, Rehberg is anti-abortion, pro-war and fanatically
pro-industry. He backs Bush's schemes on social security and
tax breaks for corporations, is weak on education and health
care and hostile to the environment. Well, Kelly's proved to
be a bigger pain in their ass than the Republicans. In 1994,
he ran as a Green against Democrat Pat Williams. He got 10 percent
of the vote and scared the hell out of Williams and his backers.
And they've never forgiven him.
When he decided to run for congress as
a Democrat this year, the first stop he made was to Williams'
office in Missoula. Williams is now a professor at the University
of Montana and a kind of brahmin for Montana liberals. The former
congressman didn't have much to say to Kelly. After he won the
Democratic primary, Kelly made another surprise visit to Williams,
asking for his support in the race against Rehberg. Williams
basically slammed the door in his face and told him to make an
appointment next time.
"That's the moment when I knew that
the Democratic party establishment would rather lose this seat
than deal fairly with me," Kelly says. After he won the
primary, the party had to let him into all of their meetings
and hand over their fundraising lists. When he got his hands
on the donor list, Kelly found that the names of many of the
top donors had been blacked out.
"They said they doubted my allegiance
to the party," says Kelly. "Hell, I'm an artist. I
don't hold any allegiance to anyone."
Kelly has also been a fierce critic of
Senator Max Baucus, the dreadful overlord of the Democratic Party
in the state, who is even now supporting Bush's war on Iraq and
pushing through his economic package. Baucus is up for reelection
this year as well and, despite a weak Republican candidate, it
looks like he wanted all the party's political machinery mustered
in his campaign. But the notoriously thin-skinned Baucus is hostile
to Kelly, who has repeatedly savaged the senator's noxious record
on the environment.
The Lee newspaper chain came out with
poll in early October showing Kelly with 28 percent and Rehberg
barely above 50 percent. "That's not bad considering none
of these papers have written about my campaign," Kelly says.
Not bad, indeed. In fact, Kelly is polling
5 percentage points better than the approval ratings of Montana's
Republican governor, Judy Martz, who recently opined that mining
and timber companies are the "real environmentalists."
"Two-thirds of the people have never
heard my name, but I'm still polling better than our governor,"
Kelly laughs.
In fact, Republican farmers in eastern
Montana recently came to Kelly asking for help after the governor
stiff-armed their plea for her to oppose wide-spread drilling
for coal-bed methane gas.
"Coal-bed methane drilling is horribly
polluting," says Kelly. "It really fouls up the water.
These guys are just now learning firsthand about the dark side
of one of the old wicked laws of the west: the split-estate.
You might own the land, but you don't necessarily own the coal
or minerals that lay beneath. And if somebody else owns those
subsurface right, they're going to destroy your land to get at
the gold, coal or oil. We've lost so much to those giveaway laws.
But I found them a good lawyer and now they'll be able to fight
back."
I met Kelly in early October in the small
town of Three Forks, where the Madison, Gallatin and Jefferson
Rivers come together to form the Missouri. Kelly pulls up in
a dusty Ford truck. It's his equivalent of a campaign bus. The
bed is stocked with yard signs, bumperstickers and Kelly for
Congress t-shirts.
"Nice truck," I say.
"Damn right," Kelly says. "When
you run a grassroots campaign out here you learn pretty quickly
that the kind of car you drive makes a big first impression on
people." Of course, the truck also comes in handy for his
day job: hauling around his sculptures (including his funny bronze
"Bird Dog", a Labrador with wings) and flowers from
his Botanica gallery in Bozeman.
The fact that Kelly knows how to arrange
orchids and gladiolas and can make a living at it is yet another
puzzling contradiction for the people of Montana. "The way
I see it there's only about 1 percent of the people in this state
who have any real money," say Kelly, referring to his gallery
and flowershop. "They're the ones with money and we gear
our gallery to sell as much to them as we can."
This is the way Montana is going, a state
divided by a handful of millionaires and a lot of people living
on the margins.
If his gallery plays to the Bozeman elite,
his politics is decidedly populist, with an appeal that stretches
from Earth First!ers and constitutionalists to rank-and-file
union members (though not the leadership) and the wheat farmers
of the Great Plains.
Kelly was born in Ithaca, New York and
raised in Philadelphia. He has studied hotel management in college
Colorado and spent summers planting trees in the Oregon coast
range, backbreaking work that also gave him a firsthand look
at the devastating effects of industrial forestry.
He moved to Montana in 1975, attracted
by ski slopes, grizzlies and trout streams. He helped start the
Alliance for the Wild Rockies, a new breed of grassroots environmental
group that sought to protect entire ecosystems. He also went
back to school, getting a degree in Fine Arts from Montana State
University in 1992.
We walk over to the only cafe in town.
It's packed with ranchers eating large breakfasts. They look
at us and nod at Kelly. I'm given the quizzical look Montana
ranchers reserve for Oregonians, which is a lot warmer reception
than you get in similar establishments in Idaho.
Three Forks has seen better times. So
has much of rural Montana, where the ranches are getting more
than half their income from federal crop supports, most of the
gold and silver mines are abandoned toxic waste sites and the
wheat farmers are under attack from an array of multi-national
robber barons.
"The economy is tanking," says
Kelly. "We were watching it teeter like the twin towers.
And all the while, big business is ripping people off faster
than ever. They start with the poor and defenseless and work
their way up. People are worried about their social security
and access to health care. I'm for universal health care. People
say, but that's socialism. I say: name me something that isn't
socialism. Except when it comes to small businesses and working
people."
Montana has been hit hard by NAFTA. Trade
policy isn't an abstract issue here. The wheat farmers and ranchers
are in trouble, pinched between cheap imports and consolidation.
About all the state has going for it these days is tourism. And
that has its drawbacks, too.
"The most popular campground in
the Gallatin valley is the Wal-Mart parking lot outside Bozeman,"
says Kelly, shaking his head. "Even the campers want to
be close to shopping now."
Another big issue for Kelly is deregulation,
especially the utilities. The state's former electric utility,
Montana Power, sold out to Pennsylvania Pacific Power and Light.
Inevitably, electric rates went up.
"Now it's a long distance call,
just to talk to your electric company," says Kelly. "And
Montana Power, which used to be a regulated and profitable utility,
turned itself into a telecom company. Now it's a penny stock.
And all these investors can't get any answers about what happened
to their money. This deregulated environment is a kind of cannibalism
that's eating its own."
Kelly's plan is to allow citizen enforcement
of stock fraud and corporate malfeasance. He likes the model
of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. He knows
both of them well from his environmental work, which consists
largely of heeding the motto: "Sue the bastards." Ask
the Forest Service. For the past decade or so, Kelly has been
a one-man wrecking ball against their schemes to clearcut what's
left of Montana's forests.
"We have to go right after corporate
crime the same way," Kelly says. "To hell with Harvey
Pitt and the SEC, let the people sue these executives directly.
Then you might see a change in behavior of these fat cats."
"Lots of people have a romantic
illusion about Montana, as the last best place," says Kelly.
"It's the same kind of promotion that's been going on since
Thomas Moran painted those watercolors of Yellowstone to aid
the railroad companies. Yeah, we've still got some wild places.
But Montana is a pretty industrialized state, run by the big
mining and timber companies. We have entire towns that are Superfund
sites, like Anaconda and Butte."
Then there's Libby. This small mill town
in northwestern Montana is one of the most polluted cities in
the nation, largely do to asbestos contamination from the large
abandoned vermiculite mine operated by WC Grace. More than 165
people have died from illnesses directly related to the pollution.
Dozens of others are seriously sick. Yet, both the state and
the feds have been slow to take action to help the victims and
begin cleaning the site up. The governor opposed designating
Libby a Superfund site.
"If 167 soldiers had been killed
by the Blackfeet, it would have been a national memorial,"
Kelly says. "But a chemical company can kill that many people
and the politicians don't even take notice."
Kelly is anti-war and he says so are
most of the people he talks to out on the campaign trail. "No
one understands the rush to invade Iraq," Kelly says. "No
one knows why we have to act alone. The UN isn't real popular
in Montana, but people out here don't think we should keep waging
war by ourselves. They're worried about the return of the draft."
But the big fear in many parts of Montana
is with Ashcroft's war on the bill of rights: secret courts,
warrantless searches, detaining people on minor violations.
"Even the cops are paranoid,"
says Kelly. "I like to drive fast. And I get pulled over
a lot. They usually just give me warnings, but I talk to these
troopers and they're worried about the way things are going.
Ashcroft says that they're supposed to participate in Homeland
Security. But no one told them what that meant or if there's
any money in it."
Kelly wants to protect the entire constitution,
even the parts that most liberals want to do away with. It's
one of the reasons Kelly gets a fair hearing among libertarians,
constitutionalists and even Montana militia types.
Take the issue of guns. "I don't
like guns much, but I like the idea of screwing around with Constitution
even less," Kelly say. "So I want to protect the Second
Amendment from assault by the feds. The idea of background checks
is a good one. If they destroyed the information after the check,
but I don't think that's the gameplan. The idea of all these
government lists and electronic databases scares a lot of people,
including me."
Kelly is also something of a fiscal conservative.
It's a lesson he learned by watching how the West has been destroyed
by political subsidies to industry. "People can't understand
how the richest country in the world is broke," says Kelly.
"It's because the federal handouts are going in all the
wrong places. If we weren't giving the timber and mining companies
and the irrigators all this federal money, then they couldn't
afford to be doing all this stupid stuff."
I pay for our breakfast at the cafe.
Kelly walks back to the table and conspicuously doubles the tip,
which seems the politic thing to do. He has to rush up the road
to Missoula for an interview. He rarely passes one up.
Kelly was supposed to be debating Rehberg
this week, but the congressman backed out. It was probably a
wise move on Rehberg's part. He'd be no match for Kelly, who
doesn't fit any cheatsheat profile. Rehberg's a plodder and dull.
Kelly is smart and has a laser wit.
"The insiders talk about the art
of politics," Kelly says. "But they've got it backwards,
as far as I'm concerned. I enjoy politics as art. That's what
makes it fun."
But this campaign isn't just a lark.
Kelly is running to win. If not this election, perhaps the next
one. "I love Montana because it's still a wild and crazy
place," says Kelly. "Anything can happen here. Who
knows? Who would have predicted the collapse of Enron or WorldCom."
Who knows, indeed.
Today's
Features
Jason Leopold
The New
York Times, Salon, Enron and Me
Jennifer Loewenstein
Khan
Yunis:
Before the Juggernaut
Ben Tripp
Let Wag
the Dogs of War or No Peace at Any Price
Will Youmans
Israel's
Plans to "Transfer" Palestinians During Iraq War
Linda S. Heard
Israel's
Image Problem:
Fire Up the Propaganda Mill
Lawrence McGuire
Eight
Ways to Smear Chomsky
Baruch Kimmerling
Why
is the US Scaring Me?
Alexander Cockburn
Dwarf-Throwing
& the UN:
Shape of Things to Come
Tom Walker
The Work
Ethic and Its Discontents
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- How to Change the Subject: Corporate Scandal and Pension
Reform as Weapons Against Warmongering;
- Padilla's Predecessor: Court Ruling Cites 1904 War
Against Mining Union;
- Adios Hitchens: the Dorian Gray of Our Time;
- Object of Suspicion: How the FBI Watched Janis Ian
From Birth;
- First Carter, Then Clinton,
Now Sen. John Edwards:
Another "New South" Slimeball;
- Corporate Crooks: Nature or Nurture?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|