True Grit: Two New U.S. Senators
By SusanUnPC on November 18, 2006 at 11:47 AM in Current Affairs
Tomorrow morning on Meet the Press, Tim Russert, hobbling since he broke his ankle, will host two of the most unusual men ever elected to the U.S. Senate to “talk about Iraq and the new Democratic Senate.” Two rough diamonds who don’t want (or need) no shinin’ up thank you very much. One, Montanan Jon Tester, who knows how to “butcher a cow” and “grease a combine.” The other, Virginian Jim Webb, who defends “the dignity of his people — the gun-loving, country-music-singing, working-class whites of Scotch-Irish descent who fight in wars, staff the nation’s factories and shop its Wal-Marts.”
Jon Tester, senator-elect, Montana: It is fitting that a third-generation Westerner, Timothy Egan — who just won the non-fiction National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl — wrote a great character sketch of Tester for Monday’s New York Times.
For all the talk about the new Democrats swept into office on Tuesday, the senator-elect from Montana truly is your grandfather’s Democrat — a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916.
It is a place with 105-degree summer days and winter chills of 30 below zero, where his grandparents are buried, where his two children learned to grow crops in a dry land entirely dependent on rainfall, and where, he says, he earned barely $20,000 a year farming over the last decade.
Chouteau County, where Mr. Tester lives on a homestead of 1,800 acres, lost 8.5 percent of its population in the last five years — typical of much of rural America that has been in decline since the Dust Bowl.
To make extra money, Mr. Tester taught music to schoolchildren, and still plays a decent trumpet despite having only seven fingers (he lost the rest to a meat grinder as a child). He got into politics just eight years ago in a sustained rage over what utility deregulation had done to small farmers and businesses in Montana.
“You think of the Senate as a millionaire’s club — well, Jon is going to be the blue-collar guy who brings an old-fashioned, Jeffersonian ideal about being tied to the land,” said Steve Doherty, a friend of Mr. Tester’s for 20 years. “He’s a small farmer from the homestead. That’s absolutely who he is. That place defines him.” (Read all.)
Jim Webb, senator-elect, Virginia: I was surprised, when I checked in on the passionately angry lefty blog of Chris Floyd, a former columnist for The Moscow Times who currently writes for Truthout.org, to see his feature piece on Webb:
I don’t know that much about Jim Webb. I don’t know how he will actually vote when lobbyist push comes to corporate shove in the Senate. And I certainly don’t buy into the propensity of so many in the blogosphere (not to mention the mainstream media) to fall into swoons of hero worship over this or that politician.
But I will say this: Webb’s recent opinion column – in the Wall Street Journal, no less – put the facts about the elitist rapine of the American people about as squarely as you could hope for from an elected official writing in an Establishment paper. If Webb backs up these insights with political guts, he could serve as a formidable champion for economic justice – or at least (and more likely, given the near-total corporate-elite control of Congress) an outspoken gadfly, in the Proxmire mold, who by stating bald truth draws constant attention to the hypocrisy and servility of his colleagues.
What I found especially interesting was Webb’s insider exposé of the true attitudes of the corporate elite – their overwhelming sense of entitlement, their utterly callous dismissal of the rabble they squeeze their riches from. Let us have more of this, Senator Webb.
Some excerpts: The most important–and unfortunately the least debated–issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.
Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic’s range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade…
Trickle-down economics didn’t happen. … (Read all.)
We could use more like these two in the Senate.
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