Behold, the cowboy Democrat

The Indian Express: [It is] tempting to imagine that [after] eight years of watching our leaders hunting quail and clearing brush in front of television cameras the country will have got over its thing for cowboy statesmen. Wrangling, roping, and a fondness for pork rinds no longer seem like the best indicators for leadership abilities. As it happens, a cowboy arrived in New York last week: Scott Kleeb, a 32-year-old senatorial candidate from Nebraska. Kleeb (pronounced “Kleb”) is best known, among Nebraska liberals, for being a bright, blue hope in a red state: a charismatic beef farmer with a PhD from Yale. To others, he’s the guy who was sabotaged, during his first congressional campaign, in 2006, by a series of fake middle-of-the-night robo-calls, which greeted groggy voters with a recording of his voice: “Hi, this is Scott Kleeb!” He’s also known, locally, for having defeated his current opponent, the ex-Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, in a milking contest (painful, since Johanns is the son of a dairy farmer). And congressional-race watchers call him “the hot rancher”: Kleeb is six feet three, and he tends to wear tight Wranglers for publicity shoots...He talked about the problems with privatised health care and the need to let “Iraqi folks” take control of their own government. “Support the troops doesn’t mean give ‘em a bunch of rhetoric and then cut out their benefits,” he said. “It means working to pass fundamental ways to make change.”

[In] 1998, he started working summers on a ranch while getting his PhD, in American history. As part of his dissertation research, he spent a year living in his old pickup and driving around to state parks. Once, he was chased by a bear. The thesis topic? “The Atlantic West: Cowboys, Capitalists and the Making of an American Myth.”

Excerpted from an article in ‘The New Yorker’

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