The New Yorker: Where’s the Beef? (Kleeb D-Ne)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/08/25/080825ta_talk_widdicombe

by Lizzie Widdicombe August 25, 2008


As our thoughts turn to Denver, it’s tempting to imagine that the political stagecraft on view will be different this time—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 thirty-two-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 Ph.D. 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!” (The investigation concluded this year; the calls couldn’t be traced.) 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 looks, it has been pointed out on political blogs, something like the young David Hasselhoff.



Last Wednesday, the fund-raising group Think Blue hosted a cocktail party in Kleeb’s honor in a Chelsea apartment. The invitation urged guests to welcome “our favorite Democratic cowboy”: “Enjoy BBQ and an ice cold beer or stick to wine and cheese. . . . Your call, just leave the bull riding to the candidate (seriously, he knows how).” There were chicken wings, sausages, and buckets of beer. (Earlier, Kleeb had eaten a bacon burger at Ted’s Montana Grill with a Nebraskan pal from the Willa Cather Foundation.) Someone was selling twenty-dollar tank tops that said “I Only Sleep with Democrats.” Kleeb stood off to the side, his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his Wranglers. He had on a striped cowboy shirt and dusty boots. He opened a bottle of Rolling Rock with a lighter.

“He’s the most all-American candidate I’ve ever met,” Sarah Rothman, a public-relations executive, said. “It seems like he’s a real man of the people.”

Risa Whipple, who works at the National Lacrosse League, said she had come because of “the picture on the e-mail.”

“Yeah,” her friend Jill Eisenpress, a senior research manager at Hachette, said. “He brings a little bit of good-lookingness to the whole political scene.”

A circle formed around Kleeb, and someone tried to hand him a microphone, which he waved off. “I don’t do as well with these things,” he said. He talked about the problems with privatized 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.” And he made references to his childhood: he grew up moving with his parents from one military base to another and spent time with his grandparents in Broken Bow, Nebraska. Then, in 1998, he started working summers on a ranch while getting his Ph.D., 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.” “What’s interesting is we tend to think about the cowboy as being this iconic American image, but in reality he resold his cattle globally, and he was part of the world economy,” Kleeb said. He does something similar, raising organic Kobe beef, which he sells to restaurants in Los Angeles and Europe. “I spend my days doing paperwork,” he said.

“I think there’s a misunderstanding of people in the cattle industry,” Kleeb went on. “A cowboy is somebody who’s concerned with things in the world in which he lives.” He elaborated: “The creak of leather as you’re riding a horse. The shadows as the sun sets. Dew on a cow’s back. The smell of rain. The smell of cut hay.” Of his fellow-ranchers, he said, “They’re just hardworking people who want nothing more out of life than to get a better future for their kids. That’s no different from folks here. There are a lot of people who watch the sun rise in these tall buildings, and watch the sun go down.” ♦

Democratic Undergound for Kleeb US Senate @ ActBlue: http://www.actblue.com/page/du_for_kleeb

[TwilightGardener]

1. Neat! Thanks, Omaha Steve. Saw some Kleeb stickers in Lincoln yesterday--

I don't know much of a chance he's got against Johanns, but he's got my vote.