Brian Schweitzer (D)

He married Nancy Hupp, who he met in college, in 1981 and flew to the Middle East where he spent years installing hundreds of miles of irrigation pipe to turn 28,000 acres of Saudi Arabian desert into farm land to help the Saudis reduce their dependence on America for wheat.

The couple returned home to Montana in 1986 to start a family, run a cattle ranch, grow mint and build an irrigation business. "I'm just a rancher who ended up governor of Montana," he likes to say.

2000 Senate Race

In 1993, Schweitzer was appointed to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agencyin the Clinton administration. In 1999, he madehis first run for office for a U.S. Senate seat held by incumbent Republican Sen. Conrad Burns. Burns was not supposed to be up for re-election. He had pledged to limit himself to two terms when he first ran for office in 1988, but he broke that pledge, saying, "Circumstances have changed and I've rethought my position."

Schweitzer beat his opponent, John Driscoll, 2-to-1 in the 2000 Democratic primary, though in Montana, where fewer than 1 million people are scattered among 94 million acres, Schweitzer's impressive 66 percent of the total amounted to just 59,000 votes. Schweitzer quickly turned his attention to Burns, who not only hurt himself politically by breaking his term-limit pledge but also caused an uproar during a speech on high gas prices when he referred to Arabs as "ragheads."

Schweitzer gained national attention during the campaign as the first candidate to organize a prescription drug-buying trip to Canada as a protest against higher U.S. health-care costs, particularly for seniors. "This is about embarrassing Congress," said Schweitzer, whose brother, Mike, a physician, arranged for Schweitzer's passengers to get prescriptions from a Canadian doctor, as the law required.

Excited by Schweitzer's innovation on the issue, national Democrats invited him to Washington to speak at a fundraiser for the Senate campaign committee. But Schweitzer embarrassed his hosts by ripping into drug-industry lobbyists who were in attendance. When then-Sen. Bob Torricelli (D-N.J.) tried to apologize to the lobbyists, Schweitzer's legend back home grew - as did his number of campaign stunts.

At the state capital, Schweitzer arranged for armed guards to spill a suitcase full of cash on the floor in front of reporters to highlight how much out-of-state money Burns was receiving. At another rally he appeared with a giant check for $4 million made out to Burns from special interest groups that contributed to the incumbent's campaign.

Schweitzer lost only narrowly to Burns, 51 percent to 48 percent, but he'd done well enough that when the next opportunity to run for statewide office came up in 2004 - this time for governor - he jumped at it.

2004 Governor's Race

Schweitzer chose as his lieutenant governor running mate John Bohlinger, a Republican state senator and a small-business owner who was also a former Marine boxer who favored bow ties and once had to be physically restrained in a bar when someone mocked his neckwear. And, applying lessons learned in the Senate race, Schweitzer decided to push an issue that would cement his relations with the state's rural, conservative voters: guns.

Guns polled well not only among the state's vast number of hunters but also among women, who saw it as a "Montana values" issue in a state with one of the nation's highest gun-ownership rates and lowest violent-crime levels.Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic presidential nominee that year, was openly mocked by Republicans when he donned hunting attire during the campaign, but Schweitzer was far more authentic on the issue - he once bought his wife a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver for her birthday. - and insulated himself from charges that he was a Kerry clone. Moreover, Schweitzer turned the gun issue against Republicans by taking up the cause of Montana hunters and fishermen who had lost access to private lands because of Republican policies that favored private-ownership rights over public access.

The strategy not only appealed to conservative rural voters but also to liberal environmentalists who wanted to preserve more open public land and it portrayed the outdoorsmen as David to the Republican Party's Goliath, a theme that resonated in other areas of the Schweitzer campaign message.

Schweitzer beat his Republican challenger, Secretary of State Bob Brown, a fixture on the Montana political scene for two decades, 50 to 46 percent, on the same day PresidentGeorge W. Bush won the state by 20 percentage points. And Schweitzer's coattails were long enough to help Democrats take control of the state Senate and four of five statewide offices.

Example to National Democrats

Schweitzer's victory is held up as an example for Democrats seeking to break Republicans' hold on Red State America and at least five books published on the subject have mentioned the Montana governor since his 2004 victory and his easy 2008 re-election.

Schweitzer has no shortage of invitations to speak to fellow Democrats around the country and his address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention propelled him to much broader public attention when, in a speech on alternative energy, he rocked the convention hall even though he had been sandwiched between that evening's keynoter, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D), and the day's climactic speaker, then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, (D-N.Y.).

An internet campaign has begun to draft Schweitzer for presidentand "Brian Schweitzer for President" T-shirts are now available online.

As Governor

Montana's swaggering governor awakes every day at 4 a.m. and scans the national news, talk shows and blogs on his computer before heading into the office with his Border Collie, Jag, in tow. He's almost always attired in the same anti-power suit: A sports jacket over an open-collar shirt, bolo tie, jeans and cowboy boots. His popularity ratings consistently hover around the 70 percent mark, among the highest of the nation's governors.

Schweitzer is wrestling with many of the same issues as other governors, including health-care costs and recession-induced budget deficits. But his top priority is alternative energy and his No. 1 goal - the "Big Kahuna," he calls it - is to turn Montana into an energy supplier for most of the West, including Nevada and California. He recently gave up his Chevy Tahoe SUV for a Volkswagen Jetta that runs on biodiesel fuel.

He wants to invest $1.5 billion in technology that would turn coal - an abundant resource in Montana - into diesel fuel, which he said is needed to free America from the "sheiks and dictators and rats and crooks" who control the world's oil supply, a dig at the Saudis for whom he worked for years to help them gain independence from American wheat.

But Schweitzer's initial foray onto the national scene was bumpy. Shortly after being named chairman of the Democratic Governors Association in December 2008, Schweitzer took the unusual step of endorsing Clinton insider and Democratic fundraiser Terry McAuliffe in Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary in June 2009. Because the DGA chairman usually remains neutral in Democratic contests, Schweitzer's appearance with McAuliffe spawned immediate speculation that Schweitzer wanted McAuliffe's support for his own national political ambitions.

Making matters murkier was the fact that Schweitzer endorsed McAuliffe just as another Democrat, state Sen. Creigh Deeds, was surging in the polls, going on ultimately to win the nomination and embarrass Schweitzer.

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