Montana Fusion

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 as a Republican.

Montana is the fourth largest state. But it has only one congressional seat. The incumbent congressman is Dennis Rehberg, a bland right-wing 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, has yet to get a dime of campaign aid from the national Democratic Party or the state party.

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 is 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% of the vote and scared the hell out of Williams and his backers. And they've never forgiven him.

Kelly has 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 a 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 widespread 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 rights, 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 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% 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 in 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 multinational 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 the 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 the 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 due 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 up the site. The governor opposed designating Libby a Superfund site.

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 the 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 the Constitution even less," Kelly says. "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 scare a lot of people, including me."

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.

"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.