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The onlooker

John Hoeven’s picture showed up on national network news the other day.

This is remarkable. Hoeven is the least conspicuous senator from North Dakota in a quarter century.

The title might go to Jocelyn Burdick, who was appointed to fill her husband’s seat. She served three months in 1992. Milton Young would be another contender. He served for more than 35 years, rarely spoke publicly and seldom attracted attention outside North Dakota. In the state, he kept himself visible by writing a report from Washington for weekly newspapers.

In politics, being popular and being conspicuous are not synonymous, of course, as Hoeven has proven. Inconspicuous as he has been, Hoeven is arguably the most popular political figure in the state’s history.

Statistics prove it.

In October 2009, his approval rating as governor was 87 percent. It’s gone down some since then. He won 76 percent of the votes in the 2010 U.S. Senate election, and in 2016, he was re-elected with 78.5 percent of votes cast.

A recent poll put Hoeven’s approval rating at 66 percent, good enough for fourth among U.S. senators and at the top of the Republican approval list.

What accounts for this?

Political smarts, for one thing.

Hoeven is masterful. Nobody else works a crowd as well as he does. His memory is impressive and his ability to recognize faces and draw people to him is incredible. As governor, he took on roles as cheerleader and spokesman, delegating many details of policy to Jack Dalrymple, his lieutenant governor and successor.

Hoeven is also careful, and he has an uncanny ability to skirt controversy of almost every kind. Plus he’s always on message, so he frames issues and directs conversation. He’s able to bring his own concerns into any interview, sometimes changing the subject so deftly that a reporter wonders who asked a question about unmanned aerial vehicles or a new oil pipeline, for example.

Hoeven is focused. He tackled only a couple of issues in a decade-long governorship, and had substantial success with both. His administration raised teacher salaries and ended dependence on property taxes to fund education. His economic development efforts helped bring new jobs to the state.

In fact, much of Hoeven’s behavior seems more in keeping with an economic development director rather than a senator.

In the Senate, his committee assignments reflect both Hoeven’s caution and his focus. Except for the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Homeland Security, these assignments show a preoccupation with North Dakota issues: agriculture, water, energy, rural development – the kind of issues that interest an economic development director. He chairs the Indian Affairs Committee, another frequent assignment for North Dakotans in the Senate.

Of course, Hoeven is also lucky. His governorship coincided with the Bakken Boom, and rapid development of oil resources drove job growth. As the saying goes, “Oil makes things possible.”

Right now, though it looks like Hoeven’s luck might be running out. His favorability rating is down to 66 percent – still good enough, as noted above, to make him the most popular Republican in the Senate.

What’s more, the issue of the hour has forced Hoeven into the spotlight.

That issue is health care, and it’s the toughest one Hoeven has so far faced, in Bismarck or in Washington.

Health care brought Hoeven’s picture to the TV screen. He was one of 10 Republicans who withheld support of Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s health care bill. He didn’t speak up until enough other Republicans had doomed the bill, though. McConnell has redrafted the bill; so far Hoeven has been silent.

McConnell has wooed other senators with amendments specific to their states, the so-called “polar amendment” for Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, for example, and “the sunshine amendment” for Florida’s Marco Rubio. There’s no word if McConnell has offered Hoeven anything, but an amendment specific to rural states was an important part of the original health care bill. This is the so-called “frontier amendment” dealing with reimbursements for rural hospitals.

Hoeven has supported the amendment in the past.

The issue is important to state legislators, too. North Dakota opted for the “enhanced Medicaid” provisions of the health care bill, and the continuing expense has been an important factor in the state’s ongoing budget challenges. Significant changes in health care laws would probably bring lawmakers back to Bismarck for a special session.

The risks to North Dakota are significant – and in Hoeven’s focused universe, that means the risks to him are important, too. They are not immediate, however; his current term runs through 2022, when he will be 65.

He’s one of two dozen Republican senators who won’t ever have to appear on the ballot with Donald Trump. Even so, Hoeven has been even more cautious toward Trump and his troubles than he has been toward health care.

Mike Jacobs is a former editor and publisher of the Grand Forks Herald.

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