Schweitzer Q&A: Montana guv talks politics, immigration

With Montana’s “first dog,” Jag, frolicking nearby, that state’s bolo-tie-wearing governor, Brian Schweitzer, fielded questions from the Iowa Independent and La Prensa, a western Iowa Hispanic newspaper, at Sen. Tom Harkin’s steak fry Sunday in Indianola.

A popular Democrat from a conservative Intermountain West state, Schweitzer shared his thoughts on the tightening presidential race, and he connected his own family history to the subject of immigration reform.

Iowa Independent: Governor, former Majority Leader (Dick) Armey says polls are underestimating the “Bubba vote,” and that they’re not taking into account the race factor enough. You’re somebody who seems to understand the Bubba vote. What happens with it and are those people being underrepresented in polls?

Schweitzer: See this? (pulling a cell phone from his pocket and holding it in his hand) A lot of young people don’t have a land line and you can’t poll. Young people are voting 70-30 for Obama. So if you want to start talking about the people that are under-polled start talking about the college students, start talking about young people. Start talking about Generation Y. They’re going to vote for Barack Obama and they carry cell phones.

Democratic Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (left) speaks with U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, at the latter's annual steak fry in Indianola, Iowa, over the weekend.

La Prensa: How do you feel about immigration reforms?

Schweitzer: Well, McCain was for it before he was against it. It depends on which immigration reform you’re talking about, but as I look around, I’m looking around for all the people that are here who are Native American.

In Montana, we have about 7 percent of the people that have been there for 400 generations. Their immigration policy would be a lot different if they could have it over again. When people talk about westward expansion they call it an eastern invasion. Immigration policy is not a debate that just happened this year. We’ve been debating it for 150 years.

There’s an ebb and flow. The bottom line is almost everybody here comes from an immigrant family including myself.

La Prensa: Could you be more specific about the reforms you want to see?

Schweitzer: I believe people that people who want to work and raise a family and come to America built this country, and over the course of the last 150 years we’ve had waves of immigration.

I’m half Ukranian and I’m half Irish. At the time of the turn of the century when the Irish were coming to homestead, the signs on the streets in New York said, “Help wanted: Jews and Irish need not apply.”

Some say that the derogatory term “wop” actually stands for “without papers” and that they referred to all of the Italian immigrants for a time that way.

Chinese immigrants who came here built our railroads. Japanese and the way they were treated during World War II, and the list goes on.

I’ll just say that I learned my first lessons about ethnicity when I was just a youngster.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer

My father’s family were homesteaders in Montana and they came from Ukraine but they were German speakers. They were so-called German-speaking Russians.

While his parents and their parents had never been to Germany, when World War I came around, they were discriminated against across this country and they passed the Sedition Act and made it against the law to speak or read in German in Montana.

My father served in World War II, but since German was his first language, there was always a concern about ‘Is he a patriot or not?’

And my grandmother, she never learned to speak English, only German. My parents, they kind of kept us away from her because they saw it as a detriment to be able to speak German.

Then, this is where it gets interesting.

My first day of school, I’m going to school, and my mother sits me down — and I just went to a little country school, nine kids in my class — and she said, because by this time it’s 1961 and we are in the Cold War, “If anyone asks you about the name Schweitzer, don’t tell them we’re Russian, tell them we’re German.”

So it swings back and forth in this country, and it has for a long time.

I want to repeat the principle: Families who want to come to America, work in America, raise families in America ought to be welcome because that’s the thread that has made this blanket so warm in this country. We need to have a system that allows people a path to citizenship. That’s the way we’ve done it for the last 150 years.

Iowa Independent: Sen. McCain has a suspect track record on agriculture. How do you get rural voters, who are a key swing vote, to get back to the economics of rural America, rather than personalities and cultural issues?

Schweitzer: McCain, I believe, has never voted for a farm bill. He’s never supported any investment in rural America. He’s against wind power. He’s against biofuels. He’s from Arizona and he’s against sun power.

So I don’t know what he offers rural America.

Barack Obama has a plan to invest in rural America, build transmission lines, invest in biofuels, invest in wind and solar power, which will all create jobs. In fact, Obama’s energy plan will produce 5 million new jobs in America — energy produced in America, designed by American engineers and developed by American workers.

When you compare their ideas for the future, one is more of the same and the other is a man with a plan.

Iowa Independent: Why have Joe Biden and the Obama campaign seemed to be flummoxed in the last week. Is that the media’s fault that we’re just focused on Palin?

Schweitzer: I think Obama and Biden have been in two or three cities a day and near as I can tell Palin went back to Alaska. The media can talk about whatever you want to talk about.

I think the campaign is ongoing, but for regular people, the campaign actually starts on the first debate. That’s when people start tuning in. For those of us in politics and those of you who are in the media, you’ve been focused on that. For example, here in Iowa, for — I don’t know, what is it, 20 months?

But that’s not the 25 percent of people who decide elections in America. Those people, they’ll clue in about the 15th of September and beyond.

Iowa Independent: Does the attention now on Palin help the Obama campaign by making her seem more familiar more quickly?

Schweitzer: John McCain is running for president and so is Barack Obama. The focus is on the two presidential candidates.

Iowa Independent: Why is it that the Obama campaign has almost allowed George W. Bush to become historical in the present?

Schweitzer: I think it’s self-evident. McCain has voted with Bush 90 percent of the time. McCain really represents a continuation of the Bush administration.

McCain represents the interests of Bush today.