I knew Seth Bodnar was going places when we first met at a family brunch in the nation’s capital in 2010.
He was newly married, after all, to the former Chelsea Elander Flanagan, a fifth-generation Montanan, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard-educated pediatrician, and soon-to-be founder of Montana Pediatrics in Missoula.
Fifteen years prior, her step-mom Terri Elander, who has helped propel the renowned Missoula Children’s Theatre onto the world stage, asked that I keep a casual eye on Chelsea while she interned on Capitol Hill for then-Montana Sen. Max Baucus.
The next thing I knew she was volunteering at a Washington, D.C. homeless shelter.
Locals here in the Flathead, as an aside, will remember Chelsea’s gregarious uncle, onetime Kalispell restaurateur Mike Fuller of “First Avenue West” fame, who delighted patrons by flying-in fresh seafood from Seattle and creamy Guinness from Dublin.
Like Chelsea, Seth was hitting his stride when the couple crossed paths at the University of Oxford in England: first in his class at West Point (he’d even teach there); Green Beret with multiple deployments to Iraq, including as a special aide to the U.S. commanding general; Rhodes Scholar and Truman Scholar.
In time he landed at General Electric, becoming senior executive; and more recently, while serving as lieutenant colonel for the Montana National Guard, president for eight years of the University of Montana.
None of which, Bodnar stresses, are “the two most important things to know about me.”
“I’m the son of two public school teachers: my mom taught kindergarten and first and second grade, my dad taught fifth grade,” he takes pride in recalling. “And the second important thing to know about me is I married an amazing woman.”
I rest my case.
“Chelsea is a pediatrician,” her husband observes. “Her focus has been on expanding healthcare access, particularly in rural and tribal communities. And we’re blessed with three kiddos.”
Wherein the overriding concern: for family, state, and country.
“What I see, what Chelsea sees—and I’m going to keep saying ‘we’ because this is a team decision—we see a toxic partisanship and a broken national political system that is not serving the needs of hardworking families in our state.
“We see political leaders working to divide us and distract us—frankly while they enrich themselves—and nothing gets better for the people of this state. And we decided that we can no longer stand aside and do nothing.
“So” he explains, “two people who have been kind of ‘rule followers’ for most of their lives decided, ‘You know what? It’s time to get out of line. It’s time to challenge a two-party system that’s not working for the people of this state, that’s not working for our kids.’
“I believe our kids deserve better,” he continues. “I believe my friends who I served with in the military—who gave the ultimate sacrifice for this country—deserve better. I believe you deserve better.”
Consequently, Bodnar rather abruptly in recent months resigned his prestigious academic post and set off on an atypical mission: running—“interviewing for the job,” he prefers saying—as an Independent candidate to represent the citizens of Montana in the U.S. Senate.
Why take the harder road?
So as “not to answer to a party boss in D.C.,” he justifies. “And to not go to D.C. and engage in partisan-party warfare. But to go to the U.S. Senate and fight every single day for one team and one team only. And that’s the people of this state. To answer to you.”
Suddenly, with more and more Montanans flocking to his unaffiliated side, Seth has gained the undivided attention of each mainstream political party and their arguably chagrined U.S. Senate nominees: Republican Kurt Alme and Democrat Alani Bankhead.
One Republican source, who splits his time between Montana and Capitol Hill, goes so far as to tell me: “I think Bodnar has a very good chance to pull it off,” pointing out that the Independent out-fundraised Alme two-to-one through mid-May.
As for Bankhead, who it was reported last week lost the financial backing of her major PAC, my source predicts she “will drop out and endorse Bodnar just before the deadline to do so.”
If that were to happen, it could potentially double the voter support for Bodnar overnight.
Here’s my petition: If you have the opportunity to hear from Seth in person take advantage of it. Between now and Election Day he’ll be coming to a town near you. I promise you’ll hear some non-so-fun facts about Montana—and this country—the status quo will never tell you.
They wish they could tell you, but they can’t. You get the idea.
“I will tell you that our problems are not just political, they’re not just financial, our problems in this country right now are spiritual. We are ripping ourselves apart,” Bodnar underscores. “And that’s being fueled by billions of dollars being spent to divide us and distract us …
“What we’re doing is not working. And we are failing our kids, absolutely failing future generations. There’s not a single farmer or rancher or small business owner in Montana who would tell you that their goal is to hand over an operation to the next generation that’s in worse shape than than they found it.
“Yet, that is exactly what we are doing in this country right now,” he warns.
That said, as a onetime “conservative” columnist in Washington, I’ve decided to cast my next vote for the person, not the party.
As far as I’m concerned, the Republican Party has been AWOL ever since Ronald Reagan died.
The other option? What you see now is what you’ll continue to get.
“And that’s who goes to Congress,” Bodnar adds. “And we get more and more divided.”
“We’ve got to break this cycle,” he encourages, which “is going to require us to demand more of our leaders. It’s going to require you to demand more of people like me who are seeking to work for you. And I say work for you because somehow we have lost the idea that service is about putting others above yourself …
“And yet somehow we’ve come to accept a model of leadership in this country where that’s flipped. We have come to accept that as normal. That’s not normal. That’s not okay. We need fundamental change to what we expect and what we demand of our leaders in this country …
“I’m not a perfect human being,” Bodnar concludes, “but I’ll guaran-dang-tee you that every single day I will have one focus and one focus only: what’s good for this state, what’s good for the people of Montana, and what’s good for this country. That’s what this campaign is about.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.