< Sen. Jon Tester Starts His Newest Job

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Heard on All Things Considered

January 9, 2007 - MICHELE NORRIS, host:

And our colleague, Melissa Block, has been spending time with one of the members of that committee, freshman Democratic Senator Jon Tester.

MELISSA BLOCK: Right, Michele. Jon Tester of Big Sandy Montana. He is one of the most distinctive members of the Congress and he is hard to miss. He is a big man with a flattop haircut. He was president of the Montana State Senate. He is also a third generation farmer. His family farms 1,800 acres, all of it organic - wheat, barley, lentils, peas. And he is missing three fingers on his left hand. He had a meat grinder accident when he was nine.

I spent the whole day with him yesterday. I met him first just before eight in the morning at the townhouse that he and his wife, Sharla, are renting on Capitol Hill.

Good morning.

Ms. SHARLA TESTER (Wife of Senator Jon Tester): Good morning.

Senator JON TESTER (Democrat, Montana): (unintelligible) the door.

BLOCK: So how was your day so far?

Sen. Tester: So far, well, just getting it going. Just - on my second cup of coffee so things are going well.

BLOCK: Sharla, loose in pajamas, sitting at a tiny kitchen table. She has been cooking for them and they came prepared. They brought a cooler full of meat they butchered on her farm.

Ms. TESTER: Oh, let's see, we brought rib steaks, T-bone steaks, hamburger, pork chops, pork sausage.

Sen. Tester: No roast?

Ms. TESTER: I didn't bring any roast.

Sen. Tester: Oh, in the next trip.

Ms. TESTER: Next trip, I'll bring the roast.

BLOCK: Now, I'm going to bet that Jon Tester is the only senator who came to Washington with his own cooler full of home-butchered meat - just a guess. Breakfast on Monday was Spartan, a bowl full of fruit.

Sen. Tester: I bought a suit and I bought it at a size small, so I've got to drop some weight in order to get into the suit. It's an expensive suit so that's motivation. There's three more on order.

Ms. TESTER: - And three more suits on order, so got to get the weight off.

BLOCK: And with that…

Ms. TESTER: See you, hon. Bye.

Sen. Tester: See you.

BLOCK: Oops. Forgot one thing.

Sen. Tester: Better give her a kiss (unintelligible).

Ms. TESTER: Have a good day.

Sen. Tester: Yep.

BLOCK: And we're off, walking to work in a light rain. Fifteen minutes or so passed the elegant library of Congress and the Supreme Court, past many security barriers, jaywalking once or twice.

Sen. Tester: You know, it's not what I'm used to at all. I mean, usually, you know, typical morning on the farm is you'd get up and go out, take care of the livestock, hauling wheat or whatever, you know. This is a whole lot different.

BLOCK: But you still got your boots?

Sen. Tester: Still got my boots. A little different attire, too. Ties aren't recommended.

BLOCK: The boots, for the record, are black and shiny, smooth ostrich. The red tie is easy care, extra long.

(Soundbite of buzzer)

BLOCK: We go down in the elevator to the basement.

Sen. Tester: Yeah. Yeah. We're in the bowels of the Dirksen Building.

BLOCK: Jon Tester and four fellow freshmen are entombed in the lower reaches of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Down a dingy brown hallway, across from the Senate stationery store, you take a left off the stacked cartons of 3 x 5 cotton flags.

Sen. Tester: Good morning.

Unidentified Woman #1: Good morning.

Sen. Tester: How is it going?

Unidentified Woman #2: Great.

Unidentified Woman #1: Good.

Sen. Tester: Good.

BLOCK: These are temporary quarters, a dozen or so staff squeezed into a small warren of windowless rooms until Senator Tester's real office is assigned. He is dead last in seniority - number 100 of a 100. There is nothing on the walls. A clump of fresh putty is drying on a battered corner of the senator's desk. Jon Tester was elected as a straight talking, tractor riding, prairie populist who pledged to make the U.S. Senate look a little more like Montana.

Sen. Tester: I hope people see me as somebody who is a working person, somebody who is well-connected with the land, and somebody who is here, you know, fighting for the middle class. Some people might think, you know, he's just a farmer. He doesn't know really what he's doing. You know what, I need to prove myself that I'm here and we're going to work on doing that.

Unidentified Woman: Hello. It's nice to see you, Senator.

Unidentified Man: Senator Virginia Jon Tester, pleased to meet you.

Unidentified Man: Welcome to the Washington and to the Senate.

Senator JON TESTER (Virginia, Democrat): It's good to be here.

BLOCK: Next stop, a visit to Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. He chairs one of the six committees Jon Tester will sit on - Energy and Natural Resources.

And Senator Tester wants to stake a claim for the sub-committee assignments he'd like to get.

Sen. TESTER: I'm very, very concerned about the energy situation. Dealing with America becoming more energy independent and the role renewables can play in that. And I'm also very concerned about global warming and I know you are, too. Because I don't want Montana to turn into a dessert.

Senator Jeff Bingaman (Democrat, New Mexico): Right. I understand that problem.

BLOCK: Senator Tester gets no commitment but he did get a tantalizing glimpse of a real Senate office.

Was it of a different world over there, wasn't it?

Sen. TESTER: With windows, you mean?

BLOCK: Yes. Upholstery…

Jon Tester will tell you his priorities as senator are energy independence, health care, and fiscal responsibilities. When you're running the kind of deficits that these budgets have been running the last five years, and in fact, you know, our foreign debt has doubled. If you want to know about national security problems, that's huge. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

If I ran my farm that way, I would have been broke a long time ago.

BLOCK: Later, when he meets with staff to go over his schedule, there's a surprise.

Unidentified Woman: You'll be presiding on the floor four hours a week, every week.

Sen. TESTER: Really? No, (unintelligible)

Unidentified Woman: So you're going to see that -

BLOCK: Jon Tester has an idea.

Sen. TESTER: Because I was thinking maybe we can have the 5 a.m. - 7 a.m. time block.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BLOCK: Farmer's hours, you know. One final bit of business sobers things up. His chief of staff, Stephanie Schriock, hands the senator the death notice for a soldier.

Sen. TESTER: This is an Iraq one.

Ms. STEPHANIE SCHRIOCK (Senator Tester's Chief of Staff): Yes.

Sen. TESTER: Oh, god.

BLOCK: It turns out the soldier's dad is from Chester, Montana.

Thought that was awfully close to your backyard.

Sen. TESTER: It is. But I don't know the name at all. There are some Allens in Fort Benton that I know, and in fact, there are some Allens in Big Sandy whose son works in Chester. But this isn't related. So where's he's been buried at, do you know?

Ms. SCHRIOCK: We don't know yet.

Sen. TESTER: All right.

BLOCK: Jon Tester has heard the talk - the president likely to increase troops to Iraq, some members of Congress warning they'll restrict funding for any troop increase. Senator Tester isn't sure about either.

Sen. TESTER: How you would specifically earmark those cuts, I don't know even if that's possible. And then, on the other side of the coin is that, you know, I mean, they're over there fighting and we need to support them. So it's kind of a Catch-22 because, you know, I think that the president needs to come to a realization that things have not gone well. They continue not to go well. And we need a different plan, if there has ever been a plan, which I'm not sure there has been, quite frankly, from my perspective.

BLOCK: It's noon and time for a ride on the underground Senate tram(ph).

Sen. TESTER: That was close.

(Soundbite of tram noise)

Unidentified Man: So (unintelligible) reopen, you know that right?

Sen. TESTER: I (unintelligible) and just stick your hands in there and they would reopen? Okay.

Unidentified Man: You'd be missing three more…

Sen. TESTER: Three more… I can't afford to lose any more digits.

Unidentified Man: That's right.

BLOCK: Jon Tester is going to the Capitol for his first vote as U.S. senator. This is one of the easiest votes he'll cast. A resolution to celebrate the life of President Gerald Ford.

Unidentified Man: MR. Tester.

Sen. Tester: Aye.

BLOCK: He joined a unanimous Aye vote. From there, upstairs to a crowded news conference, the freshmen Democrats who have been invited to talk about the ethics reform bill. Each has been given two minutes. But Jon Tester takes just one.

Sen. Tester: We have an opportunity to step up to the plate and restore the people's faith back in the government. Thank you very much.

BLOCK: Jon Tester owes his seat in the Senate, at least in part, to voters' concern over ethics. He defeated incumbent Conrad Burns who got a lot of many from tainted lobbyist John Abramoff and his associates.

We're going to fast forward to the rest of the afternoon. A quick lunch in the Senate cafeteria, a meeting with Senator Byron Dorgan on Indian affairs.

Senator BYRON DORGAN (Democrat, North Dakota): How many reservations do you have?

Sen. TESTER: There's seven.

BLOCK: A briefing on Homeland Security.

Sen. TESTER: The director of national intelligence was created, right?

Unidentified Man: Correct.

BLOCK: And a cell phone negotiation over a new tractor he wants to get for his farm.

Sen. TESTER: All right. And how much was it again?

Unidentified Woman: $49,000.

Sen. TESTER: You're a dickering guy.

BLOCK: Then a quick make-up session for an appearance on CNN.

Unidentified Man: This is where we change your image.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Sen. Tester: All right.

BLOCK: Five minutes with Wolf Blitzer.

(Soundbite of archived CNN interview)

Mr. WOLF BLITZER (Host, CNN Today Show): Joining us now is a new member of the United States Senate, Democrat Jon Tester.

BLOCK: More meetings with the staff and finally, some time with his 21-year-old son, Shon. They'll go to the Senate gym, then home for dinner.

Mr. SHON TESTER (Son of Jon Tester): Mom has pork chops in the oven.

Sen. TESTER: With applesauce?

Mr. S. TESTER: I don't know.

BLOCK: And Michele, I should mention those pork chops are from the farm back in Montana.

NORRIS: Melissa, after spending what sounds like a full day with Senator Tester, what is your sense of this man?

BLOCK: You know, I think with Jon Tester, what you is really what you get. He seems totally comfortable in his own skin. As you heard, he laughs easily and often, he's not afraid to admit what he doesn't know, which can be rare in this town. And he doesn't seem overwhelmed by the trappings of power all around him.

I tell you one final anecdote. It might have been my final moment of the day. I was standing by his desk, and I noticed that on a piece of paper, he had written his name a few times. And I jokingly asked him, senator, have you been practicing your signature? And he laughed and said, in fact, yes, I have, that he had to sign his name for the autopen, which is the automatic signature that will go out on his official correspondence and he wanted it to look good. So he was practicing.

NORRIS: Thank you, Melissa.

BLOCK: You're welcome.

(Soundbite of music)

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