A cut above

Jon Tester looks back at the razor-thin election win that landed him in Washingtion, D.C.

It was a roller-coaster year for Jon Tester, the farmer from Big Sandy who managed to unseat three-term incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., in the Nov. 7 election.

And the ride is far from over, with Tester deep into establishing his staff in Montana and Washington, D.C., and learning the basics about being the state's junior senator.

"It's going very well, but it's a lot of work, that's for sure," said Tester in a recent telephone interview from his home in Big Sandy.

Tester looks back on his 2006 campaign experience as being demanding, challenging and rewarding.

"To say it was challenging is an understatement," said Tester. "We were in a situation where you have to make a living. It was very challenging to try to work on the campaign and to work a real job and make a living."

Tester said he put just less than 100,000 miles on three vehicles traveling across the fourth-largest state in the country. With his pickup averaging 46 mph, he figures he put in about 2,173 hours of windshield time.

"We got to know the convenience stores pretty well," he quipped.

The demands of the campaign brought about drastic lifestyle changes. Leisure time was no more.

"Back in the old days, I used to sit down and watch the Seattle Seahawks from beginning to end," he said, but this year he was lucky just to get a glimpse of any football game.

And, Tester admits, the campaign wasn't exactly a health workout.

But it was rewarding in profound ways, Tester says.

"It was a great overall experience. We met a lot of really great people in the state of Montana," he said. "The amount of respect that people gave us when we around the state, and the kindness … it was really amazing."

At a recent gathering, Tester said he asked supporters how many of them had ever heard of him in January 2005. Very few said they knew of him two years ago, he said.

"That's why you have to have money to run a campaign," he said.

The campaign itself was riddled with ups and downs, on a daily - even hourly - basis.

"It was like riding a roller-coaster," he said. "You'd come into work and people would tell you something, and you would feel like you were on cloud nine, and the next day, you would wonder why you are doing this."

The downside of a Senate campaign was predictable and unavoidable, just a reality of modern politics. Tester said he and his wife, Sharla, talked at length about the potential ugliness that could come with the game.

"There are definitely some bad parts," he said. "We talked about how there would probably be things said that were painful and untrue. I can't say that it surprised me, because it's part of the turf."

Tester said he was motivated by an intuition that he could win the race. Although the polls showed him with a consistent and sometimes wide lead over Burns, Tester had to consider the advantages of an incumbent over a challenger with no experience in running for a statewide seat.

"I thought we could win, and I thought we would win," he said. "But to be honest, it seemed like we weren't the favored candidate most of the time … But in the end, if you take a look at what we had to accomplish through the process, it's pretty amazing that we pulled it off."

Tester ended up winning by a narrow 3,562 votes out of a total of more than 406,000 that were cast. His victory was instrumental in swinging control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats.

Since then, Tester has been in full transition mode. He went to "Senator School" along with nine other new senators. Tester says he is a bit different from most of the Senate, being a bona fide farmer raised on a family homestead in rural Montana.

"I'm definitely different, because I take the rural standpoint," Tester said. "There are two people in the Senate who are from production agriculture, and I'm one of them."

He recalls having lunch with Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., of the wealthy Rockefeller family.

"He said, 'You know we came from different backgrounds, but we ended up in the same place,'" Tester said with a chuckle. "I thought that was pretty entertaining."

Tester and his transition team have been picking up "constituent concerns," hiring staff and developing policy priorities. He said he anticipates hiring as many as 40 people, with roughly half of them working in Washington, D.C., and the other half stationed across Montana.

He said he wants to hire as many Montanans as possible, but for many potential staffers, "moving to D.C. is not exactly a step up in terms of a quality of life standpoint."

He anticipates he'll have to search far and wide for the best help possible on major issues.

"There are some issues out there that are pretty doggone big, and will require an exclusive person to handle them," he said, citing health care and energy as examples.

It was a long year for Tester in many respects. "It seemed like it was going slow, but in retrospect, the year went very quickly," he said.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com