The next Jackson Hole liberal

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-During a recent Jackson Hole Hootenanny, David Wendt, a Jackson Hole resident, got on the stage and performed one or two of his favorite cowboy ballads. By no means a Hoot regular, Wendt prefers to play for himself and maybe a few close friends and family members. One of his favorite old tunes, which he didn’t happen to perform that night could have been written about Wendt himself.

“The Zebra Dun,” penned by the 20th century American folk singer Cisco Houston, is about an educated stranger who knows as much about horses as he does about world history and literature. Some cowboys, the song goes, think they’ll put the stranger in his place by putting him on the meanest horse in the corral, but he surprises them with his cool in the saddle.

“It’s a song about a gentleman who turns out to be the best rider,” Wendt said. “I guess I do identify, as an Eastern-educated person who knows horses.”

Throughout his career, David Wendt has called on foreign and domestic leaders to rethink the way they view issues ranging from global health and the environment to women in leadership roles around the world. Since 2002, Wendt has focused particularly on environmental and energy issues related to industry in China through the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs, the Jackson-based NGO he co-founded and of which he is president.

Wendt, a Democrat who has no experience as a politician, is challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Cynthia Lummis for Wyoming's at-large seat in congress. He is the the most recent Jackson Hole resident to aim for the state's single House seat, once the office of West Bank homeowner Dick Cheney, who held it through most of the 80s. No Democrat has held the seat since Teno Roncalio left it in the late 70s.
Fellow Democrat and Teton County resident Gary Trauner very nearly unseated an unpopular Baraba Cubin in 2006, but was defeated more soundly by Lummis in 2008. Last week, Wendt caused a few ripples by taking a shot at Lummis, criticizing the congresswoman over her employment of an aid who is the former head of a disgraced federal mineral management agency.

The Lummis campaign quickly fired back with a strong repudiation of the move, calling it “classless,” “slanderous,” and “unbecoming.” Overnight, a race that had passed unremarkably turned acrimonious, leading some to wonder whether Lummis vs. Wendt could become as polarizing as any other U.S. congressional race.

Until recently, very few Wyoming residents outside of Teton County would have heard the name David Wendt. Some of the state‘s Democrats first learned it last month, when the tall, thin man with an East Coast brogue introduced himself at the party’s state convention. Even in Jackson Hole, where he has led a relatively quiet life over the last 12 years, Wendt has yet to build a name for himself as a candidate; his name is nowhere to be found on stickers, buttons, or Facebook.

Wendt’s platform so far is primarily about responsible stewardship of Wyoming’s mineral resources. But it’s not accurate, he argues, to paint him as the liberal candidate who would hand control of the state’s fossil fuels to bureaucrats and environmentalists. “We already have built-in protections that would prevent that from ever happening,” he said in an interview last week.

Wendt said not enough has been done to incentivize the state’s mineral development industry to move toward so-called clean coal. “It is in our interest to provide market-based incentives,” he said. “Rep. Lummis and her two colleagues” – Senators Mike Enzi and Mike Barrasso – “have failed, in my view, to appreciate the value of market coal-gasification,” he said, referring to a process many cite as a pillar of cleaner energy. Wendt predicts that Congress will vote on new energy legislation within the next two years and that Wyoming will need a progressive legislator in its corner in order “to have the leverage here.”

The Lummis campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment by press time, had not brought up Wendt’s name prior to its counterattack last week. If the race continues to unfold with traded licks, it’s reasonable to predict Lummis or her supporters may eventually try to paint Wendt as ‘the next Jackson Hole liberal’ who’s out of touch with the rest of the state. Whether that’s an accurate or even a relevant portrayal is beside the point. (Though it also wouldn’t be difficult to portray him as an East Coast elitist.)

Wendt was raised in a middle-class New Jersey family. His parents were both first-generation college graduates who evidently instilled in their very bright, only son (Wendt has a sister), a strong desire to achieve at the highest reaches of this country’s educational system. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard and has a doctorate in political science from Columbia.

He started coming to Jackson Hole as a teen, when he spent several summers working on the White Grass dude ranch near the southern Tetons, eventually becoming head wrangler. He says he learned to appreciate the old fashioned Jackson Hole values of connecting with horses and the land while simultaneously falling under the spell of the mountains and the valley.

Wendt may have received his education at some of the best schools on the East Coast, but he says he strongly identifies with average Wyoming residents. “I’m the kind of guy who’s spent a lot of years of my life with some manure on my boots,” he said of his humbling summers in the Tetons and, later, his family life on a northern Virginia farm. “I do identify [with many Wyoming residents], and I expect that’s going to come across in the campaign.”

As a college student in the 1960s, Wendt was exposed to the radicalized anti-Vietnam War atmosphere that invaded most Ivy League campuses. Yet even as he himself objected to the war and marched in Washington along with busloads of other students, Wendt said he always felt a kind of ideological separation between himself and many of those contemporaries. He even had what he described as a mild disdain for so many 60s liberals whose appearances helped perpetuate the image of a group of people who had chosen to drop out of respectable society. “I never thought that was the right way to go about it,” Wendt said.

Instead of letting his beard and hair grow out, Wendt kept his looks neat, he said, and took to wearing a coat and and tie as many of his peers dressed the part of dropping out. As a tall, lanky young man, he must have stood out in his coat and tie as a square among the hippies.

Nonetheless, he met his wife, Olivia Meigs, an artist and photographer, at Harvard. As director of communications for Wendt for Wyoming, Meigs is currently the campaign’s only staffer. She fills the same title at the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs.

Following Harvard graduation, Wendt took a volunteer teaching job in Tanzania, in East Africa. There he was exposed to the African independence movement of the 60s, a time when several countries broke away from colonial rule. He witnessed the influence of international leaders, including the founding father of Mozambique, and began to form a more global outlook.

Wendt returned to the states to enroll in the doctoral program in political science at Columbia University, and eventually arrived at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan foreign policy think-tank in Washington, D.C. At CSIS, Wendt established a new department for International Economic and Social Development, which developed a number of policy reports based on input from former legislators as diverse as, for example, two very different ‘Als’ – Simpson, the conservative senator from Wyoming, and Gore, the democratic senator from Tennessee.

Wendt has said his years of experience building bipartisan consensus has equipped him to reach across the party aisle. But last week’s exchange of fire with the Lummis campaign could be a bad sign for any expectations about bipartisanism.
State Senator Grant Larson, a Republican who has been involved with the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs to such an extent that he has traveled twice to China with the organization, said Wendt was brilliant when it came to fostering a dialogue among opposing sides, but isn’t cut out for politics. “My experience working with him was good ... when he wasn’t in the political realm,” Larson said when asked about Wendt. “Having said that, I can’t say that anything successful came out of it other than dialogue. I do not believe he is suited to the political end of things, which are a whole new ballgame.”

Larson believes the Center for Global Affairs, an organization that would be the envy of any other small community, will inevitably pay the price for what he describes as Wendt’s ill-advised foray into national politics. “[The center] was very good,” he said. “I think it’s now history.” It would be impossible, Larson said, for Wendt to return to the Center, which is far more his than anyone else’s. “Once you get into the political realm, you’ve lost the nonpartisan aspect,” Larson said. “I think it will now be judged as part of the Democratic party.”

Some Wendt supporters say he is a luminary with unparalleled experience in foreign policy and who would challenge the Republican status quo in Wyoming.
“He will tell the truth to the people in Wyoming in a way that Republican-party-speak in Wyoming doesn’t allow it to be told,” said Steve Duerr, a friend and fellow co-founder of the Center for Global Affairs. “David understands it’s an uphill fight to run for Congress as a Democrat in Wyoming, but that’s a testament to his integrity.”

It’s unclear when Wendt will have an opportunity to challenge Lummis in a debate, though he expects the day will come. He said he plans to gradually build a campaign that climaxes just as the general election arrives in November.

The congressional race will test whether enough voters are so dissatisfied with Lummis and Republican primacy in Wyoming that they’re willing to bet on an East Coast transplant from the county that’s at the butt end of a lot of political and cultural jokes in a mostly conservative state.

Does Wendt believe he has a shot in hell? “You bet I do,” Wendt said. “We’re going to generate some groundswell here and we’re going to turn some heads in this state. JHW

photo by Derek Diluzio
David Wendt

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