Helen Chenoweth Slick At Being Rustic

Supporters see her as something of an anti-politician.

Not quite.

With her disarming smile, doublefisted handshake and basketful of canned speeches, Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, is every bit the savvy stateswoman, Idaho-style.

She has mastered analogies and the one-line sound bite. She turns reality into colorful, useful anecdotes. She occasionally slips into rousing insider tales that clash with a homespun, greenhorn image.

During a recent sweep through North Idaho, the congressional rookie referred to powerful people by their first names and told the same off-the-cuff-sounding stories to three groups in two days.

During her orientation, “Newt” warned freshmen Republicans not to buy a house during the first 100 days, she said repeatedly. They’d be too busy working at a breakneck pace comparable to “drinking water through a firehose.”

Escalating government spending “is like a train running downhill,” she told two separate Bonners Ferry audiences. “What we need to do first is stop the train.”

Chenoweth can be a champion myth-maker when playing to a crowd.

In warning Orofino grizzly bear opponents to keep reintroduction efforts under local control, she raised the specter of an incident in Lemhi County. There, a rancher claimed federal agents harassed him while investigating the shooting death of a transplanted wolf.

There was no physical exchange. No one was injured. The charges remain in dispute.

Still, Chenoweth referred to the incident as “a tremendous human tragedy.”

Chenoweth explained to 75 supporters in Bonners Ferry how strange it was to be stuck in Washington, D.C., a place where “process is everything.”

In Idaho “we’re used to planting a seed,” she said. “I’m used to getting cloth and making a dress. When I’m hungry, I grab a mixing bowl and make a cake.”

In talking with Boundary County elected officials, forerunners in a movement to prevent the government from cutting logging and mining jobs, Chenoweth said she refused to condemn militias because, “I don’t know that it’s the militia that’s spiking trees or chaining themselves to bulldozers.”

The most bombastic Idaho politician since former Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, Chenoweth has earned a national reputation as a verbal flamethrower.

Yet when former Boundary County Commissioner Ron Smith countered that he fears militia-types are encouraging people to answer problems with guns, she responded with no discernible irony.

“I, too, am concerned about the heightened rhetoric,” she said. “I think it’s my responsibility to calm that down.”

, DataTimes