The Well-Grounded Senator – Jon Tester of Montana

Every 15 minutes of a senator’s waking life in Washington is fully scheduled with meetings, hearings and votes, and much of the rest is devoted to a frantic search for money to fuel the next campaign. "Of any free time you have, I would say 50 percent, maybe even more," is spent on fund-raising, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa told the New Yorker recently in a scathing portrait of an overstressed and utterly ineffective legislative body, one that measures acts of real significance in the single digits per term.

So it was refreshing to hear how Senator Jon Tester http://tester.senate.gov/ , a Democrat of Montana, is spending his summer vacation. While other senators drove the campaign trail, dialed for dollars or lounged on a beach somewhere, Mr. Tester went home to his farm and harvested wheat.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/opinion/11wed4.html?_r=1