Behold, the cowboy Democrat

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 8220;Kleb8221; 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, he8217;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: 8220;Hi, this is Scott Kleeb!8221; He8217;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 8220;the hot rancher8221;: Kleeb is six feet three, and he tends to wear tight Wranglers for publicity shoots8230;He talked about the problems with privatised health care and the need to let 8220;Iraqi folks8221; take control of their own government. 8220;Support the troops doesn8217;t mean give 8216;em a bunch of rhetoric and then cut out their benefits,8221; he said. 8220;It means working to pass fundamental ways to make change.8221;

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? 8220;The Atlantic West: Cowboys, Capitalists and the Making of an American Myth.8221;

Excerpted from an article in 8216;The New Yorker8217;