BY PATRICK CROWLEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
LEXINGTON -- The sun was setting over a Campbell County political picnic on a late-summer Saturday, and Scotty Baesler was working the crowd and handing out his equivalent of a campaign brochure -- a small bag of sunflower seeds.
"Kentucky roots. Kentucky values," it states in deep blue across the front of the bag. "Plant the seeds of change with Kentucky sunflowers."
"These are different; these get somebody's attention," said Mr. Baesler, a U.S. House member and Lexington Democrat running against Northern Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning in this year's U.S. Senate race.
Sunflower seeds, however, aren't exactly flashy. Neither is the candidate. He'll be the first to tell you so.
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BAESLER BIO
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Age: 57.
Home: Athens.
Hometown: Athens.
Family: Wife, Alice; two children.
Religion: Christian.
Education: Bachelor's in accounting, University of Kentucky; law degree, University of Kentucky; master's in education and human development, George Washington University
Work experience: tobacco farmer and attorney; 1967-78; administrator for Fayette County Legal Aid, 1967-73.
Political career: Elected vice mayor of Lexington, 1974; elected Fayette County District Judge, 1978; elected mayor of Lexington, 1982; re-elected mayor, 1986-90; elected to U.S. House, 1992; re-elected to U.S. House, 1994-96; defeated Louisville businessman Charlie Owen and and Lt. Gov. Steve Henry in U.S. Senate Democratic primary, May 1998.
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"What you see is what you get with Scotty Baesler," Mr. Baesler said during a recent Senate debate. "He speaks the language of Kentucky."
"Scotty is a smart man and a good politician, and he'll make a great senator," said Liz Poore of Walton, who is coordinating Mr. Baesler's Northern Kentucky campaign.
"But he's also the kind of guy you would want to sit down with and have lunch or just talk. He's a real down-to-earth regular person."
"You just can't protect the wealthy," Mr. Baesler said at a Kentucky Farm Bureau forum earlier in the campaign. "You've got to take care of ordinary families."
Supporters say Mr. Baesler is about as Kentucky as you get.
He was raised on a Fayette County tobacco farm and still grows burley tobacco, a $1 billion annual industry in Kentucky and the state's No. 1 crop.
He was captain of the basketball team at the state's beloved University of Kentucky and played for the legendary coach Adolph Rupp.
Bluegrass bio
He served almost a dozen years as mayor of Lexington, the state's biggest city and the Bluegrass mecca of UK basketball and thoroughbred racing.
Mr. Baesler's image as a Kentucky native and favorite son -- some of it honed, some of it created -- is a big part of his campaign.
For instance, this sentence in his campaign biography seeks to align him with just about everything Kentucky is known for:
"As the representative of the Sixth District, Baesler presides over the famed Kentucky Bluegrass region, which features tobacco farms, bourbon distilleries, Georgian homes and the horse farms supplying many of the competitors in the Kentucky Derby."
One of his radio spots drips with references to his UK basketball days.
"As a child, my dream was to play basketball at the University of Kentucky, and as captain of the team I learned to always shoot straight, work hard and never, ever give up . . . I've always been on Kentucky's team."
A little corny, maybe, but not entirely contrived.
Mr. Baesler did grow up like so many other young men in Kentucky, pining to play for Coach Rupp's Wildcats. To stay fit and focused he didn't, and still doesn't, drink alcohol. While he was raised to be a tobacco farmer, he has never smoked.
Growing up on a farm teaches one the values of hard work, family and community, Mr. Baesler said.
"The challenges a family faces on the farm, the responsibility and the discipline you are taught there -- whether it's in the tobacco field or wherever it is -- has been the cornerstone of my career as a public servant," Mr. Baesler said.
Mr. Baesler had a steady but hardly spectacular hoops career at UK.
He lettered in 1962 and '63, the year he led the 'Cats in free-throw shooting by hitting 85.5 percent. A 6-foot guard, he averaged 10.9 points in 1962 and 9.7 points the next season.
During Mr. Baesler's junior year, UK finished the season 23-3 and ranked third in the nation. But his senior year the team fell to 16-9 and didn't make the NCAA postseason tournament.
Mr. Baesler is acutely aware of the sports-related comparisons made between himself, a player of marginal talent, and Mr. Bunning, a member of baseball's Hall of Fame.
"I know Jim was good at baseball," said Mr. Baesler, who is not above poking fun at himself about his playing days.
"But this is Kentucky. I'll take basketball any day."
After receiving a bachelor's degree in accounting, Mr. Baesler went on to UK's law school, graduating in 1966. Around that time he began his public service career and over the next several years worked as an administrator for the Fayette County Legal Aid office, was elected district judge and vice mayor of Lexington and won election to his first of three terms as mayor in 1982.
The economy was relatively strong in Lexington while Mr. Baesler was in office, but he did have a couple of controversial incidents while mayor.
He urged the city to buy property for a proposed cultural center that was owned by people who had contributed to his campaigns. A state appraiser issued a report that the city paid too much, $3.5 million, for the property, but Mr. Baesler denied any wrongdoing. In an incident that didn't come out until after he left office, he had some city workers move furniture at his home. One worker was hurt and the city had to pay the employee's $30,000 workers' compensation costs.
At west Kentucky's Fancy Farm political picnic in August, Republicans had three people wearing work clothes and phony knee braces limp in front of the speaker's during and after Mr. Baesler's speech. The speech Mr. Baesler gave at Fancy Farm has also come back to haunt him on the campaign trail.
Mr. Baesler is low-key and, for a politician, almost humble. He doesn't dress flashy, he drives a pickup truck and speaks in a quick, quiet, deep Southern drawl that can be hard to understand. Perhaps to show the voters that he does have passion, Mr. Baesler gave a speech at Fancy Farm where he grabbed and pounded the lectern and hollered at Mr. Bunning and the crowd.
His supporters called the speech "fiery." The Republicans said it was over-the-top and outrageous, and it showed up in a controversial TV ad from Mr. Bunning that used music, editing and Mr. Baesler's own actions and words to make the candidate look like Adolf Hitler.
In 1991, Mr. Baesler tried to fulfill a dream of being elected governor, but he lost in the Democratic primary. A year later he was elected to his first term in the U.S. House and has been re-elected twice. He won each election by smaller margins, at least in part a reflection of how most of Kentucky has been voting more for Republicans in the last few elections.
As a member of Congress, Mr. Baesler was a founding member of The Coalition, which he touts as a group of "fiscally conservative Democrats."
At times he has voted with the conservatives and the Republicans, such as in 1996, when he was one of only 30 Democrats to vote for the GOP's welfare refrom package.
While he has supported bans on late-term abortions, also known as partial-birth abortions, he has drawn the ire of anti-abortion groups for voting with abortion-rights supporters on other legislation. Mr. Baesler did vote with President Clinton and the Democrats on bills to freeze defense spending in 1996, and he led the drive that forced House Republican leaders to debate campaign finance legislation.
According to Congressional Quarterly, a Washington-based political and government publication, Mr. Baesler votes with Mr. Clinton and the Democrats about two-thirds of the time.
But he has had some high-profile splits with the president over tobacco, including proposals to increase taxes on tobacco and regulate it as a drug.
The old Kentucky home
And he has worked to protect the federal price support program for tobacco farmers.
"The bottom line, without a program, farmers throughout the state cannot produce tobacco at a profit," Mr. Baesler said. "They will be irreparably harmed, as would the communities in which they live."
Mr. Baesler and his wife, Alice, continue to grow tobacco on the same 300-acre farm he was raised on near Athens in southeastern Fayette County.
"It's my home, just like Kentucky is my home," he says when asked about the farm. "Always has been. Always will be. There's no where else I want to live."
