Hasslington's Democrat To Watch Over The Next Several Years: Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer

Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana is fifty-three years old, which means that from this point forward he has a solid two decades (or thereabouts) to make a big impact on national and international politics. He is charismatic, intelligent, and ingratiatingly "Western" both in look (what he wears in particular) and mindset. This is a man who won re-election to the governorship of Montana in 2008 by a landslide, despite the fact that he is a Democrat heading a culturally conservative state.

(In fact, Governor Schweitzer most likely helped then-Senator Obama come quite close to Senator McCain's vote totals in Montana. On November 4, 2008, Senator McCain carried Montana by a margin of only about 2.25%, with a vote total of 242,763 to then-Senator Obama's impressive vote total of 231,667. That's a very close and very competitive presidential race in such a conservative-leaning state.)

Governor Schweitzer has pushed for the rapid development and national deployment of Montana's energy capacity--which is to say that he has pushed emerging "clean coal" technology to a great extent in the last several years--as a means of detaching the U.S. from foreign sources of oil. He has gained national recognition in this area in the last few years. At present, he is most likely watching events in places like Eastern Europe closely; Poland, for instance, has a lot of coal but would need clean-coal technology to use much of it, due to Europe's strict rules regarding CO2 emissions. (At present, Poland needs to rely on Russian gas, and the political consequences of it, to a far greater extent than its people would prefer.) This may provide a future lucrative business opportunity for Montana and, in a more general sense, the U.S. as a whole, which might in turn raise Governor Schweitzer's national and international profile to a considerable extent.

Consider this: Governor Schweitzer whipped the rather liberal delegates at the 2008 Democratic National Convention (as well as the founder of the left-wing blog-site "Daily Kos") into a cheering frenzy with both his sarcastic remarks regarding Senator John McCain and his Western "whoo-wee!" interjections (the latter of which are quite alien to a lot of Democratic-leaning voters, but seemed to fire-up such groups regardless...). At the same time, his approval ratings in Montana (which is hardly "Kos" territory) remain consistently sky-high. This suggests that he has a lot of cross-over appeal, culturally and politically. This combined with the fact that he continues to position himself as a national leader on energy procurement, use, and security issues suggests that he may very well become an increasingly important player on both the national and international stage over the next several years, in any of a number of capacities.

...Check-in soon for "Hasslington's Republican To Watch Over The Next Several Years"....