New York Times: The Well-Grounded Senator
Every 15 minutes of a senator’s waking life in Washington is fully scheduled with meetings, hearings and votes, and much of the rest is devoted to a frantic search for money to fuel the next campaign. “Of any free time you have, I would say 50 percent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa told the New Yorker recently in a scathing portrait of an overstressed and utterly ineffective legislative body, one that measures acts of real significance in the single digits per term.
So it was refreshing to hear how Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat of Montana, is spending his summer vacation. While other senators drove the campaign trail, dialed for dollars or lounged on a beach somewhere, Mr. Tester went home to his farm and harvested wheat.
The senator is the third generation of his family to operate an 1,800-acre farm near Big Sandy, Mont., where the Testers grow organic spring and winter wheat. He is spending the first week of his vacation in his combine, trying to gather the wheat before the sawflies get to it. “It brings me back to reality,” he told a local station, KFBB-TV, this week. “The combine doesn’t care if you’re a senator or not. It breaks down whenever it wants to break down.”
