Putting the Big Sky In a Populist Frame

"When he goes out to meet people, he doesn't come off real," Schweitzer said. "It is like you can see the price tag on the barrel," he said of television appearances Kerry made last year with a shotgun in his hand.

There is more to Schweitzer, of course, than good visuals and bottomless self-regard.

Bills he pushed through the legislature this spring -- more money for education, assistance for workers without health insurance, cheaper prescription drugs for the elderly -- have secured solid job-approval numbers.

Relentless travel across the state, together with his media-savvy populism, has padded those numbers. When a couple in a car collided with his unmarked Montana Highway Patrol car in a newspaper parking lot in Missoula, the governor got out and issued his first pardon. When a legendary Montana bar, the M&M in Butte, reopened for business after a much-lamented closure, Schweitzer showed up to hand-deliver the new liquor license and tossed back two shots of Jameson's whiskey.

Behind the lawmaking and the image-crafting, many Montanans -- including some of the governor's harshest critics -- see a natural-born populist whose gift of gab is matched by his work ethic.

David Berg, a conservative Republican who hosts the only syndicated radio talk show based in Montana, derides Schweitzer as "overly ambitious." But Berg said the governor was "a likable person, a helluva campaigner, and he has never stopped working to romance certain segments of the population."

The romancing has not stayed within state borders. Schweitzer makes speeches around the country and is often mentioned, along with a handful of other Democratic governors, including Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Janet Napolitano of Arizona, as part of a promising crop of New West politicians who are invigorating the Democratic Party.

"There is a lot of focus on governors in Democratic circles, and Schweitzer is a big, bold thinker with boundless energy," said B.J. Thornberry, the former executive director of the Democratic Governors' Association.

Schweitzer playfully plays down ambitions outside Montana: "I am just a Montana farmer. I don't know if what I say or do is exportable. It is a long way from Little League to playing for the Yankees."

What he has on his plate in this red state is hard enough for a Democrat, he said. When his plane landed in Dillon, he had a chance to demonstrate -- at a meeting with Beaverhead County commissioners about roads on federal land.

Bush, in overturning a Clinton-era order that made almost 60 million acres of national forest off-limits to road-building, has asked governors to identify areas where roads should not be built. The commissioners in Beaverhead County, where beef rules and resentment of Washington runs high, are eager to open up vast stretches of roadless federal land.

Gingerly, Schweitzer explained why that might not work. First, he said, the Bush administration has no money to maintain the roads it has already built, let alone build new ones. Second -- and this was the tricky part in a room full of Republican ranchers -- Schweitzer said that Montana was no longer a state dominated by ranchers, miners and timber companies.

He never once uttered the word "environmentalism" -- the closest he came to that was mentioning the need to protect land for "huntin' and fishin.' " Nor did he unleash statistics about how retirement and investment income from newcomers has come to dominate the state economy.

"I'm an aggie," said Schweitzer, who has a master's degree in soil science from Montana State University and who worked in Saudi Arabia for seven years helping the royal family build a dairy farm. "Agriculture will continue to be a large part of who we are in Montana. But growth depends on access to public land and quality of life."

Back on the gubernatorial airplane, Schweitzer noted that he had explained the new facts of life in Montana "without scaring anybody."

"Look, if I stand in front of voters and tell them, 'Everything you thought you knew about Montana's economy is wrong,' then who in the hell is going to vote for someone like that?" he said.

"Didn't we learn anything from Al Gore?"