Kleeb preaches post-partisan change

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By DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star

SIDNEY — Not far from the picnic shelter, boys in baseball uniforms wander the park.

Soaring as high as the swings will take them, young girls giggle and shout.

It’s a hot July evening in western Nebraska, bathed by shafts of sunlight that pierce the puffy clouds. High in the sky, a sliver of moon awaits its turn to shine.

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Democratic Senate candidate Scott Kleeb listens to State Legislature candidate Bernie Fehringer at the end of a public barbecue event July 10 in Sidney. (Gwyneth Roberts)

And yet, here in the Panhandle, with so many American flags flapping in the breeze, there’s a recognition all’s not well in the country.

“We’re at a standstill,” Tim Smith says. “We’ve got to get going.”

Smith, a history teacher at Sidney High, voiced that concern an hour earlier when seven teachers and three dogs sat down on a backyard patio with the man in the blue shirt, jeans and boots about to speak now.

And Scott Kleeb’s hopes will rest in large part on the sentiment expressed by Smith’s words.

“I told the staff last night the campaign starts today,” Kleeb informs about 50 people who have just finished their picnic dinner of salads, chips, baked beans and sloppy joes.

“This is the beginning of the next 118 days.”

Kleeb has rolled up his sleeves after a day that began in a sports coat.

“We can do better,” he says.

Not only in energy and health care and economic policy, he says, but in managing critical Nebraska resources, like water and the untapped potential of wind power.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with parties,” the Democratic Senate nominee says.

“We are past issues of partisanship. Your gas pump never asks whether you are a Republican or a Democrat.”

Kleeb, 32, is making his pitch in Republican country as the countdown points toward the Nov. 4 election.

Cheyenne County (Sidney) counts 4,149 registered Republicans, 1,613 Democrats.

Earlier in the day, Kleeb campaigned in Keith County (Ogallala) where the Republican registration margin is 3,991 to 1,445.

Two years ago, he lost both counties to Adrian Smith in the 3rd District congressional race, but ran well ahead of the GOP registration advantage.

Kleeb hopes to make the sale this time as the candidate of change.

And he’s counting on finding a lot more Monte Samuelsons out there who will respond to his post-partisan message.

Kleeb hits paydirt at the senior center in Lemoyne earlier in the day, when Samuelson shakes his hand.

“I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and you’ve got my vote,” he says.

Later, Samuelson explains: “I feel he’s a man who puts aside the party for whatever is good for the people. It’s time we come back to that.”

In 2006, Kleeb emerged on the scene as a compelling political story.

A single Custer County ranch hand with two post-graduate degrees from Yale who lived in a bunkhouse on the McGinn Ranch near Dunning rides out to seek an open House seat.

In terms of political theater, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Kleeb turned the contest in a Nebraska district that hadn’t elected a Democrat in 48 years into a tossup race that narrowed to within a few percentage points in polling conducted by both sides.

Close enough to prompt President Bush to fly to Grand Island the weekend before the election to summon Republican voters to protect the endangered House seat.

Smith topped Kleeb by 10 points.

Now, Kleeb is two years older, married and a father. He lives in Hastings and taught history at Hastings College during the past school year.

Some of his supporters wanted him to make a second bid for the House seat rather than enter a statewide race in which a majority of voters hail from Omaha and the Lincoln district, where he would be a new face.

On top of that, some supporters believed challenging Republican Senate nominee Mike Johanns, one of the most familiar political figures in the state, would be an impossible task.

And a second loss so soon could damage Kleeb’s political future.

It did not deter him.

Speaking to about 25 people at lunch in a cozy building that has made a generational leap from District 51 rural schoolhouse to Lemoyne senior center, Kleeb says he ran in 2006 because “I was frustrated” by partisan division and inattention to the nation’s problems.

Now, he says, he believes that people are ready for change.

And that voters are prepared to move beyond a partisan litmus test.

“One of us is part of the system that got us to this point,” Kleeb says in an oblique reference to Johanns, who has served as Lincoln mayor, governor and U.S. secretary of agriculture.

Kleeb begins this day at Lake McConaughy, one of the state’s most valued treasures.

But this is a beleaguered lake, beset by drought and irrigation demands.

“There used to be campers bumper to bumper here,” says Darrol Eichner, district manager of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission’s fisheries division, as he drives Kleeb to a barren bay far from the shoreline.

That bay used to be full.

“We’ve lost three-fourths of our volume and one-half of our surface,” Eichner says.

Kleeb has gathered representatives of all the lake’s interest groups here to talk about water policy at the visitors center.

“Water is one of the most critical issues,” he says. “And this place is emblematic of the problem, one of the flashpoints.

“You guys know this issue,” Kleeb says. “Let me learn more about it.”

Standing 6-foot-3 and almost frozen in place, his left hand at his belt, he pushes for answers.

Later, on the windy beach, he talks with campers while video cameras capture images that will show up later in TV campaign ads.

All the campers are Coloradans. Even Coda, the dog frolicking in the water.

Sure, Kleeb says, it’s not going to be easy.

“It is going to be very difficult to defeat this person,” he tells supporters at the picnic shelter in Legion Park in Sidney.

But he started this far behind in 2006, he says during an interview in his campaign van as it darts west from the heart of the rolling Sandhills in Ogallala to Sidney.

Chuck Hagel and Bob Kerrey faced similar odds when they ran their first statewide races, he suggests.

Sure, Johanns is far ahead in early polling.

“He’s been on the scene for 20 years. He’s the default candidate.”

The challenge is to “present yourself as something different,” Kleeb says.

“Change can be scary, so people understandably decide they’ve got to know more about this guy. It takes time.”

So the plan is to steadily catch and finally overtake Johanns. Over time.

“There’s an opening,” Kleeb says. “Politics has become a cool thing to talk about this year. We need to find those centers of conversations, like barber shops and coffee shops.”

And Barack Obama has created “a more favorable environment,” Kleeb says, by “inspiring the process.”

In tactical terms, Kleeb says, Obama’s bid to win a presidential electoral vote in metropolitan Omaha’s 2nd District should help by registering and energizing more young Democratic voters and African Americans in north Omaha.

Obama, he says, “makes the case for change.”

And the fact is “people are just as upset about the national debt in south Lincoln and north Omaha,” he says.

But the ticking clock is not in Kleeb’s favor.

Hagel campaigned more than two years in coming from far back to win his first Senate race in 1996.

Johanns campaigned even longer in rallying from behind to win his first statewide race in 1998 when he was elected governor.

In the backyard at Sidney, discussion moves from the dramatic success of a new reading program in the Sidney schools to the challenges the nation faces.

Sitting in the sun on a 97-degree afternoon, Kleeb steers the conversation.

Questioning, probing, offering his own views, he finally asks each teacher to pick the issue he or she believes needs to be tackled first.

The answers shape a litany of growing national challenges.

Quality health care, development of alternative energy, overreliance on oil, deficit spending, a mounting national debt, the growing cost of college education, perhaps an approaching depression.

Later, Kathy Nienhueser, a career teacher who is the Sidney Schools K-3 reading coach, says she’ll vote for Kleeb.

“I really like the guy,” the registered independent says.

“I’m really interested in health care reform and his ideas on alternative forms of energy. And I like the fact he’s taken the time to pay attention to western Nebraska and really listen to our concerns.”

Sometimes, they feel ignored, she says.

Sidney is 16 miles from the Colorado border. On the edge of town, a road sign puts it in perspective: North Platte, 119; Cheyenne, 102.

Walk from an Interstate 80 motel to the pond near Cabela’s headquarters and a couple of bunnies run ahead of you. Stand at the pond and more than 100 geese walk in formation right past you to slide into the water.

Out here, where the horizon seems to stretch ahead forever and you can see mile-long trains from beginning to end, Kleeb appears to be hitting his stride.

But the West speaks of distance.

It’s a long march ahead.

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or at dwalton@journalstar.com.