Unconventional Wisdom

NY Times:

Senator Max Baucus can be hard to decipher at times, and not just because he talks fast and is prone to mumbling. He was trying to discuss health care in an interview, but kept having to compete with a loud TV set over his left shoulder in a hotel coffee shop — two Fox News anchors speaking about (what else) health care.

“I wonder if they could turn that down,” Mr. Baucus said, exposed to exactly the kind of noise he was hoping to escape in Big Sky Country after a claustrophobic Washington summer.

As he traverses the state he has represented in the Senate for 31 years, Mr. Baucus, the Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, never seems far from being buried under some rhetorical avalanche.

After speaking at a preventive-care conference here last week, he was swarmed by protesters. Or, in Mr. Baucus’s words, “agitators, whose sole goal was to intimidate, disrupt and not let any meaningful conversation go on.” There were a couple of people in the crowd “with YouTubes,” Mr. Baucus added (meaning cameras), and he posited that the agitators were paid and probably from out of state. (“I could just sense it,” he said.)

Montana has become an unlikely center of the donnybrook over health care. The proportion of its residents who are uninsured — 16.4 percent — exceeds the national average of 15.5 percent, and health care is one of the state’s biggest industries. But it is Mr. Baucus, 67, a fifth-generation Montanan who comes from a rich ranching family, who has made the state a mountainous magnet for protester and president alike — most recently at a town meeting that Barack Obama held Friday in nearby Belgrade.