NORTH OF HELENA - At a barbecue and campaign fundraiser, U.S. Sen. Max Baucus is standing on a stage beneath towering cottonwoods that his great-grandfather planted on the ranch his family has tended for five generations.
Baucus is addressing Montana's Democratic Party faithful, trying to put into words why he loves the ranch so much. His family has worked livestock on this same ground since the late 1800s. His father's ashes are scattered here. His nephew Philip, who died as a soldier in Iraq, is buried here.
Baucus was born and groomed to run the Sieben Ranch. Until he was in college, he assumed he would grow up to be a rancher, that his life would be framed by the Big Belt Mountains to the north, his pressures measured in sheep, cattle and goats.
He remembers exactly where he was when he decided against that life: the Belgian Congo in west Africa in the 1960s, as he and some friends were hitchhiking around the world.
“It just hit me,” Baucus said, in a recent interview sitting at his kitchen table in Helena. “The world is getting smaller. Natural resources are diminishing and somehow we've got to live together.”
Baucus' younger brother, John, and John's wife, Nina, later took over the ranch.
The life Baucus chose instead is now common knowledge to almost any Montanan who's lived here the last 34 years, when Baucus was elected to his first federal office as one of Montana's two congressmen.
He became a politician.
Since 1978, Baucus has served in the U.S. Senate and is now Montana's longest-serving U.S. senator. His name is so well-known his political yard signs say only “MAX” in huge block letters. After 30 years, he is one of the top-ranked lawmakers in the Senate, chairs one of its most powerful committees and is considered a shoo-in to win his sixth consecutive six-year term in the Senate.
The Rasmussen Reports polling firm gave Baucus a 99.9 percent chance of re-election again this year, as he faces Republican challenger Bob Kelleher, an 85-year-old Butte attorney and perennial candidate who's essentially been disavowed by his own party.
Kelleher, known primarily for his quixotic quest to convert the United States to a parliamentary system of government, won a surprise victory in a six-way GOP primary this spring, and hasn't mounted much of a campaign.
As a politician, Baucus is a survivor. He is not and has never professed to be a liberal Democrat. He has strayed from his party on some fairly big issues, including President Bush's 2001 tax cuts and the Medicare expansion that created privately run, publicly funded prescription drug coverage that prohibits the federal government from negotiating with drug makers for cheaper prices.
In November 2003, the Lewis and Clark County Democratic Central Committee adopted a resolution denouncing Baucus' support for the Medicare bill as an attempt to destroy Medicare through privatization. However, there were only eight or nine central committee members present.
Baucus calls himself a “problem solver,” who doesn't fall for “knee-jerk” ideological reactions.
If re-elected, Baucus said he intends to push hard for universal health care for all Americans, a greater degree of energy independence, and new attention and money for America's languishing infrastructure: bridges, highways and ports.
Baucus' political career is so long that he has spent just four years of his adult life living full time in Montana. Yet his life, as he tells it, is rooted in the state and the family ranching business. It's a life his mother, Jean, fought to give him after his biological father, Stephen Enke, a California man Baucus hardly knew and never called “Daddy,” went to court to compel young Max and younger sister Karen to spend summers with him.
The biological father lost.
Baucus was born in Helena in 1941. His mother was married to Enke, an associate professor at Stanford University in California. Baucus spent his early life in California, a place he doesn't remember. When Baucus was about 2 and his younger sister a baby, Jean left the marriage and brought her children back to her hometown in Montana. They lived with her parents in a house on Helena's West Side built by Henry Sieben, her grandfather and founder of the expansive Sieben Ranch.
Baucus remembers when his mother began dating a young airman from Great Falls. He had a great uniform. His name was John Baucus.
Today, the senator calls John Baucus, his adopted father, one of the most influential people in his life. He taught Baucus how to fish, how to move sheep, buck bales of hay and work hard.
“I don't think anybody ever said a negative word about my dad,” Baucus said. “People just trusted him and liked him so much. What he said was the truth. There was never an ulterior motive, ever.”
The young family moved to Missoula for John Baucus' job. The future senator remembers sitting at dinner one night when he was about 5.
“I said, ‘Well, if you're going to be my dad, I might as well call you Dad,' ” Baucus said. “Dad about fell out of his chair.”
When Baucus was in early grade school, they moved back to Helena, and John Baucus took over the Sieben Ranch.
Back then, said Jean Baucus, many ranching families lived in town during the school year, commuting out to the ranch on weekends and for the summer. The Baucuses bought a house down the street from the one Henry Sieben built in the early 1900s and took up that style of ranching life. Every weekend, the family would head out to the ranch, staying in a small wooden house at the headquarters that initially had no electricity. Jean Baucus cooked their meals on a wood-burning stove.
The ranch then raised mainly sheep, and Jean Baucus has black-and-white photos of Max on a motorcycle driving sheep.
As Baucus got older, his father gave him greater chores. In high school, Baucus played football and he and his friends would buck hay bales all day for $5.
“They thought it was good for their muscles,” Jean Baucus said.
Eventually, John Baucus adopted Max and his sister, and the two kids formally changed their last names. That took time, Baucus said, because his biological father opposed the change, although he was mostly absent from their lives.
The family rarely took vacations, Jean Baucus said, but there were plenty of pretty places in the mountains above the ranch to camp and fish and they often went there. Baucus remembers summers spent working in the days, horsing around in the “gorgeous summer evenings,” and lots of camping and fishing.
After graduating from Helena High School, Baucus went to college and law school at Stanford University, his mother's alma mater. His first job out of college was with the now-defunct Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington, D.C., as a staff attorney. He later took a job with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“I loved the job,” Baucus said, but he still wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life. He called up Montana's two senators, Democrats Mike Mansfield and Lee Metcalf, and the state's two congressmen. The elder statesmen agreed to meet with the young Montanan.
“I asked all four,” Baucus said: Should I go into public service?
“(Mansfield) strongly encouraged me,” he said.
He decided to go for it, although he had one minor detail to iron out first: What party did he belong to?
The Baucuses were not a particularly political family, Jean Baucus said. She was a Democrat; John Baucus was a Republican, along with their entire extended family. But politics was not something Baucus remembers the family ever sitting around debating.
“I thought about that for about one second and decided I was a Democrat,” Baucus said. “They're the party of inclusion, of the future.”
Baucus returned to Montana in 1971 and took a job at the 1972 Constitutional Convention, where Montanans rewrote the territorial constitution with what has been praised as one of the most progressive state constitutions in the country. He later was promoted to executive director.
(Ironically, Baucus there indirectly worked for Kelleher, his Republican challenger in this election. Kelleher was one of the 100 delegates, although most of his efforts, which were aimed creating a parliament, failed.)
Baucus also had a job with a Missoula law firm.
In 1973, he served in the Montana Legislature, commuting from Missoula. In 1974, Baucus won a seat in the U.S. House, representing western Montana. (Montana then had two congressmen.) On a shoestring budget, he employed an unusual tactic to get his name out: He walked 600 miles across western Montana, from Gardiner to Yaak.
Four years later, he ran for U.S. Senate and defeated Republican Larry Williams by a 56-44 margin. Since then, he has rarely faced a difficult challenge, usually winning re-election by wide margins.
Baucus seems to work easily with some Republicans, particularly Iowa's Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. Grassley and Baucus have traded leadership of the committee several times in recent history, as their respective parties lost or gained control of the Senate. The two often issue joint press releases and launch coordinated projects.
Raised as he was in a family of Republicans, particularly a father he idolized, Baucus' ease with Republicans might be understandable. But the senator said his relationship with the other side comes more from his own disinclination toward partisan politics.
He also defends Democratic principles. In 2005, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada made Baucus the point man to lead the Senate campaign against President Bush's failed attempt to privatize Social Security.
Baucus may shy away from such bitter politics, but the enormous amounts of money he is able to raise - and share with local Montana Democrats - has been a boon to the party. This election is expected to be no different.
Baucus thrives on strenuous physical exercise, a leftover from growing up on the ranch, he said. Physical work feels good, he said. There's a beginning and an end.
“In the Senate, there's so much process,” he said.
He gets up every morning at 5 a.m. to run. He ran in the Montana Marathon in Billings a week ago and is training for both a 50- and 100-mile run.
Baucus is especially close to his only son, Zeno, a lawyer who lives in D.C. with his wife, Stephanie.
“We have lunch every Thursday. It takes precedence over everything else,” he said. “We both so look forward to those lunches.”
He said he looks forward to the next six years in the Senate as “a huge opportunity.”
“Professionally, it's the most exciting time in my life,” he said. “So much in our country has been neglected. Health care, energy. I would very much like to be part of major health care reform for our country.”
Coming Monday: A look at Bob Kelleher, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.
Max Baucus
Office sought: U.S. senator
Political party: Democrat
Office salary: $169,300
Age: 66
Birthdate and place: Dec. 11, 1941, in Helena
Home: Helena
Occupation: U.S. senator and attorney
Family: Wife, Wanda, one son from previous marriage
Education: Helena High School graduate, 1959; bachelor's degree in economics from Stanford University, 1964; law degree, Stanford University, 1967
Employment prior to political career: 1971-1974, attorney in private practice, Missoula; 1971, legal assistant at U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington, D.C.; 1967-1969, staff attorney, U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board, Washington, D.C.
Military: None
Political experience: 1979-present, U.S. senator representing Montana; 1975-1978, U.S. representative for old western Montana district; 1973-1974, state representative from Missoula; committee coordinator and executive director of the 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention
Campaign Web site: www.maxbaucus2008.com
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Vrede wrote on Sep 28, 2008 2:43 AM:
We're still waiting for him to figure that one out! "