Opinion: Clinton and Obama bring their big fight to Big Sky Country tonight

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Montana is a very large place, only slightly smaller than California with fewer residents than Bakersfield and San Francisco combined. High school football teams charter planes to reach playoff games there.

And, as a first lady named Hillary Clinton was told during a Montana hearing for her disastrous health care reform initiative in the early ‘90s, the state has three times as many bovine residents as human ones.

It also has some of the most stunning scenery, nicest neighbors and purest air anywhere. And it’s a cliche for Montanans to hear first-time visitors who think an hour’s drive is a long one get off the airplane, look around and say, ‘wow, what a pretty place.’

“This is some pretty country out here,’ Barack Obama said today. He’s leading in the polls in Montana and campaigning there for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination come August down the West’s Rocky Mountain spine a ways in Denver.

There are just 17 pledged delegates at stake in Montana, one of the last two states holding Democratic primaries, on June 3. There are nine superdelegates, each of them highly coveted by these two cityfolks who’ve come a-calling on a Saturday that would be spring anywhere else. But every breathing Democratic delegate counts these days.

Montanans alike -- Republican, Democrat, Libertarian and to-hell-with-them-all -- are....

unaccustomed to the nation thinking of them as consequential in any way except for sharing coincidental names with a pop singer named Hannah.

Fact is, the Treasure State, besides being the get-away home for countless celebrities like Mary Hart, Tom Brokaw and Andie MacDowell, also produced natives like statesman Mike Mansfield, broadcaster Chet Huntley, author Ivan Doig, actress Myrna Loy and stoic hero Gary Cooper.

Montana voters have not seemed to matter much in national elections. The reality, however, is that without little old Montana’s three electoral votes going for George W. Bush in 2000, it would have been some two-bit swamp like Florida that would not have mattered.

“One thing I hope you know about me is that I don’t quit,’ Clinton today told an audience of Montanans, who like that kind of message. “I don’t quit on you, and I don’t quit on us.’ The state certainly liked her husband through two presidential elections until the total political destruction there of Hurricane Monica.

(UPDATE: Loyal Ticket reader Don correctly points out that Bill did not eke out a win in 1996, losing to Dole-Kemp by a narrow 11,730 votes.)

The stakes this year for Democrats have drawn them out in droves even in Montana before the spring thaw. The state’s annual Democratic Party dinner, normally a draw for about 600 people, 596 of them in boots or immense buckles, is expecting 4,000 tonight.

“We may have to come back to Missoula,’ Obama told a crowd in the liberal university community. “No doubt about it.’ He’s just being polite, of course. In the general election the closest any presidential nominee of either party will get to Montana is 35,000 feet overhead on the way to or from Seattle.

It’ll be the Democratic and GOP V.P. nominees, if anyone, who visit that vast place that sent the nation’s first female to Congress, a pacifist Republican named Jeannette Rankin, who went on to become the only representative to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars.

In June when Montana is finished voting and the ground is almost finished thawing, one of these two Democrats may be finished too.

So if they’re smart tonight after the dinner and on their way back out to the airport on the south side of dirty old Butte, they’ll stop seeking voters for a change and look up at that big sky and more stars than the average person from anywhere else could ever imagine exist.

(UPDATE: Under the heading of ‘What state am I in now?’ Obama in his remarks at the state dinner tonight seemed to make a mistaken reference to Montana as a caucus state.

(According to wire service reports, the Illinois senator said, ‘Some people have been saying these caucus states out west don’t count that much. I don’t know about you, but I think they’re pretty important. And I’m tired of people saying that some states don’t count. I think every state counts.’

(Problem is, Montana had a caucus for the Republicans and Mitt Romney won with Ron Paul second. But for Obama’s party, it’s a primary election. On June 3. Hopefully, he’ll get some sleep before then.)

-- Andrew Malcolm and Mark Silva

Mark Silva writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune Washington bureau.