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Friday, June 29, 2007
726 The John Barrasso-Craig Thomas connection
She’s the love of my life. New U. S. Sen. John Barrasso describing his long-term relationship with Bobbi Brown.
No, it’s not that Bobby Brown.
Wyoming’s Bobbi Brown is definitely not the estranged husband of singer Whitney Houston.
Our Bobbi is an amazing and effective woman who has been the statewide director of the late U. S. Sen. Craig Thomas’ Casper office. She’s one of those uniquely smart and attractive women.
One of the untold stories of this past three-week campaign to replace the late senator was Sen. Barrasso’s connection with the late senator, in the form of Bobbi.
Now her role becomes very interesting. Dr. Barrasso has already said he will retain the late senator’s staff, but will Bobbi head to D. C. with him or stay in Casper?
It took the doctor a decade to finally achieve his goal of becoming a senator. For the incredibly impatient Dr. Barrasso, this ten-year wait has actually worked out very well.
If you think he is energetic now, you should have seen him at the age of 43 when he first ran for senator in 1996.
He, the ultimate winner Mike Enzi and Curt Meier of LaGrange were in an often angry and frenetic race to replace the retiring Sen. Al Simpson.
I had fun with both Mr. Enzi and Dr. Barrasso when they visited me at the local newspaper in Lander. I was in the middle of coaching my son’s tournament baseball team and asked each of them to tag along with me (at different times) while fulfilling my coaching responsibilities.
Both men were great company and obviously outstanding candidates to be senator.
As for the campaign itself, most of the orneriness was from Mr. Meier toward Dr. Barrasso.
And now, here we are. It is an amazing and wonderful coincidence for Wyoming that we now have these two effective men (Sen. Enzi and Sen. Barrasso) as our senators.
One of my issues with Dr. Barrasso at the time of that 1996 campaign was how could he leave his kids, aged 7 and 10, back in Wyoming if he was elected? It was hard to fathom doing that to my own kids and he really never could answer that well. The kids were living with his former wife, Linda Nix of Casper, at the time.
Now, both children have graduated from high school and his son is even a college student at Georgetown in the D. C. area.
Wyoming Senior Senator Enzi is one of the most effective senators in the Congress, although he prefers to operate quietly. He is proud of all the bills he has gotten passed, frankly, without the fanfare they deserved.
“It is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is a third way,” is how Sen. Enzi explains it. “And when we disagree, we disagree agreeably.”
And now we will see Sen. Barrasso’s style on a national stage. It’s easy to predict that he will quickly establish a high profile. You just cannot keep him down – his style will be different from both Sen. Enzi and the late Sen. Thomas. He will be out front more and will make his constituents very proud of him.
It is a great time for Wyoming.
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Hard to believe that we could write anything new about the late, great Sen. Thomas, but I have gleaned these items which are pretty darned interesting.
• He grew up as Lyle Thomas, his dad was Craig. His parents were teachers in Cody and young Lyle learned his love of the parks and outdoors by working at a camp the parents ran in the summertime.
• A scan of Wyoming papers during the week when the late senator died showed a great many of them running their photos of Craig astride his horse in local parades. Best one was in the Powell Tribune. It was an impossibly good photo showing Craig looking up at red, white and blue puffs of smoke in the sky.
• The National Park Service is building a big new visitor center north of Jackson that came into being through a lot of hard work by our late senior senator. Sen. Enzi is working to get it named for our late senator. Good work, Mike.
• Great quote in Planet Jackson Hole from Teton County GOP Chairman, Bill Scarlett. “It’s funny, I always refer to Sen. Thomas as an uncle,” Mr. Scarlett said. “He’s kind of like an uncle to the entire state.”
• If you want to hear more about Craig’s love of our parks and state, check out the podcast he did with yellowstonepark.com last fall. Amazing stuff. He was strong then but perhaps aware of his own mortality.
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