Jane Kleeb on Being Bold
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On Monday: A closer look at Kleeb’s role in the Keystone XL pipeline fight.
Last week, Jane Kleeb stood outside the state capitol wearing a knit beanie, cowl-neck scarf and jeans while talking to state Senator Tony Fulton, dressed in his staple black suit.
They talked about the bills introduced during the special legislative session called by the governor to try to alter the path of an oil pipeline that will bisect Nebraska if a Canadian company has its way. Buried four feet underground, the 36-inch pipe would bring oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and some crude from the Bakken shale of North Dakota and Montana, to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
Jane, a progressive, and the senator, a Republican, could not be much farther apart on most issues, but on the issue of the pipeline, they’re on the same page: The pipeline must move. Away from one of the world’s largest aquifers, the Ogallala, and the Sandhills that sit above — the nation’s largest sand dune formation.
After they part ways, Jane heads over to her nearby Bold Nebraska office and Fulton is off to a meeting of the Lincoln Independent Business Association. Bold Nebraska is a progressive organization that’s been shaking up Nebraska politics since it formed in early 2010; LIBA is a conservative business group known for shaking up Lincoln’s city hall.
Just four years after moving to Nebraska, Kleeb has turned Nebraska politics on its head with Bold Nebraska, which has helped make the Keystone pipeline a national issue that environmentalists are rallying around from the White House to Hollywood.
The issue has a Republican governor, two Republican congressmen and Republican state senators like Fulton siding with Jane and her group – their nemesis on any other day – while a prominent Democrat who helped Jane found Bold Nebraska lines up with unions, Big Business and Big Oil to promote the pipeline. The most often-uttered phrase during the legislative session called by a reluctant governor to deal with the pipeline had to be “strange bedfellows.”
One minute, Kleeb is in Lincoln teaching pipeline opponents how to effectively lobby lawmakers; the next she’s off to Washington, D.C., to join hands with actor Mark Ruffalo and encircle the White House to show opposition to the pipeline.
Then it’s back to Lincoln, where public hearings are being held on the pipeline bills.
It’s possible neither of those events would have happened this week if not for Jane Kleeb’s meddling.
In just four years, she has become a lightning rod in Nebraska. Gov. Dave Heineman chastised this earthy, 5-foot-5, deep-dimpled woman earlier this year for employing “aggressive, partisan, attack style politics that Nebraskans don’t like.”
“She has a tendency to shoot her mouth off most days,” the governor told Nebraska Watchdog in an on-camera interview.
The governor criticized Jane and others for wanting to “spend $10,000 a day just to have a debate” over the pipeline by calling a special session. Seven months later, the governor did exactly that.
It’s quite likely the governor wouldn’t have done that 180, if not for the meddling of Jane Kleeb.
So how did this 38-year-old Florida native end up changing the political landscape in a crimson-red wrapped, beach-less outpost like Nebraska?
“I met a cute cowboy,” she says, her dimples deepening.
***
Blame it on her Uncle Tommy — an urban cowboy who raised horses and wore big western belt buckles at a time when Plantation, Fla., was home to cattle rather than strip malls.
“He was the cool uncle,” Jane says. To her anyway. About 10 years ago, she started wearing cowboy boots tucked into her jeans and collecting belt buckles from antique stores and yard sales – even though she was a Florida girl who’d never met a cowboy in her whole damn life.
So when she first got a look at Nebraska rancher Scott Kleeb, she fell fast. It was 2006, and she was working for the Young Democrats of America when her rural caucus chair wanted to bring this Kleeb guy in to speak at a convention. He was a rancher running for the U.S. House in Nebraska, he was a Democrat and he was a looker.
“I was like, ‘Nebraska? No way. I’m not bringing in some right-wing guy from Nebraska,’ ” Jane said. “They said, ‘No, he’s really progressive.’ ”
The caucus chair sent her some information about this Yale-educated rancher in a Stetson who was trying to turn the Republican tide in Nebraska – and when she saw the picture, she says, “That was really about it.”
“The first time I met him, I couldn’t talk to him,” she says. “I turned all red.”
Scott agrees: “She kind of stood in the back of the room and didn’t say much.”
A couple of weeks later, she saw him again at a fundraiser and they became fast friends. Scott said Jane has an “incredible gift” of being able to read a roomful of people. After he lost the congressional race to Adrian Smith by 10 percentage points, Jane spent Thanksgiving with him in Kearney.
“I always joke that I fell in love with the Sandhills before I fell in love with him,” Jane says.
Neither of them are Nebraska natives: Scott was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. His father was from Nebraska, but his parents taught in military schools. But he spent his summers in the Sandhills at his cousin’s ranch, and moved to Nebraska in 2005 after graduating from college.
When she met Scott, Jane was a single mom with two roommates helping raise her daughter, Kora, in D.C. But Kora didn’t have a place to play outside, it was an hour drive to get her to school and Jane didn’t like Washington’s backroom dealing and backstabbing.
“I was always more comfortable at a homeless shelter or at a school with kids than in a political lobbying meeting,” she says.
It wasn’t long after the Thanksgiving visit that she and Scott realized “we really liked each other.”
“It was so comfortable for both of us,” she says.
In 2007, she and Scott married and settled in Hastings.
Jane says she was happy to leave D.C. – but it wouldn’t be long before she was immersed in the political fight of her life.
Reported by Deena Winter, dwinter@nebraskawatchdog.org
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Posted under News.
Tags: Bold Nebraska, Jane Kleeb
1:55 pm on November 11th, 2011
Don’t be fooled by this carpetbagger. She is to the left of Obama and lies about true motives.
3:37 pm on November 11th, 2011
Who cares? A slow day Joe?
5:58 pm on November 11th, 2011
There needs to be a barf alert on this article.
Still, you have to hand it to her. Snuffing out 20,000 jobs is an impressive days’ work.
8:32 pm on November 11th, 2011
Hang in there, Jane…
9:54 pm on November 11th, 2011
Face it. Jane Kleeb is the de facto voice of Nebraska’s Democrats.
The Nebraska Democratic Party is incapable of voicing an opinion on anything at all, other than imploring everyone to do as Sen. Ben Nelson demands, and silencing all who would differ with him. They are incapable of spreading the faintest whisper of what the party’s legally elected representatives – their State Convention delegates – collectively decided should be the message of the party as written into their Platform. All the effort put into composing the Platform and the party’s Constitution and Bylaws could have been put to better use eating the free donuts at the meeting, since they are universally ignored by the party hierarchy.
Jane has had the courage to stand up for SOMETHING. That is far more than those that lead the NDP have done in years. For the most part, the NDP leaders have followed the lead of their “most important Democrat,” Ben Nelson, and have been working very hard on developing the calluses necessary for straddling the fence. Any Democrat that dares to raise a voice of dissent is ostracized, marginalized and verbally abused by those that are intent on keeping the NDP purely the property of Ben Nelson.
Hopefully, Jane can continue to find issues that resound not only with Nebraska’s Democrats, but as she has proven with the pipeline issue, Nebraska’s citizens. She didn’t have as much to do with Gov. Heineman’s flip-flop as did those citizens that listened to her, considered her arguments, then put the pressure on their representatives both in Lincoln and Washington.
Jane and I don’t agree on everything, but I have to give her credit where it is due. She has started something that isn’t going to be easy to stop by merely poking fun of her sartorial predilections. Some consider her a carpet-bagger. If she is, then we need more of them just like her. At least she has accomplished something.
10:21 pm on November 11th, 2011
Enjoyed the article…I’m a native but have traveled a lot. Lived in the Sandhills, Lakeside, Ellsworth when young…Seen a lot of the world. So, have a variety of interests and enjoy learning about all who pass thru this State of ours…
10:55 am on November 12th, 2011
Good grief! It’s been 24 hours since I posted a comment here and it is still “awaiting moderation.”
6:12 pm on November 12th, 2011
Run, Jane, Run…for another Nebraska office soon.
Seriously, wish you would consider challenging Senator Ben Nelson for the 2012 Democratic nomination for the Senate.
He’s been on the public dole for more than 20 years and he just voted against a greatly-needed jobs bill.
Please, Jane, Nebraska needs you.
10:16 am on November 13th, 2011
As a long time political veteran in Nebraska my entire life, I admire the way Jane fights. We are all better because she fell in love with the Sand hills. Love you Jane the State can thank you when the issue is finally won.
1:08 pm on November 13th, 2011
You mean the 20,000 “pull a number out of our ass and keep repeating it so often that people will finally believe us, even though the Keystone I only employed 1,300 workers max, and less than 100 were Nebraskans” imaginary jobs that TransCanada claims the KXL will provide?
How’s that Kool-Aid taste, Harbison? About as good as the crow you’re eating about now?
9:31 pm on November 13th, 2011
Yikes! Watching From Lincoln!!!
You seem to know something about the “economic development” and “multiplier effect” crapola being served up in Lincoln for more than two decades…
Wish I knew your identity and wonder if we have met before???
6:51 pm on November 14th, 2011
Thank you for this article. Joe. I am a supporter of Bold Nebraska.
9:10 am on November 17th, 2011
So let me see if I got this right: we can’t use coal because the Prez says NO fossil fuels; we can’t have oil because we MIGHT have a pipeline spill someday, and so far wind and solar are limited. Well, one thing for sure, with less electricity, people will go to bed earlier and do “what comes naturally” so we can expect a population explosion as a net result of “no lights and no heat!”
So how are we going to get electricity in Nebraska . . or are we reverting back to kerosene lamps if we can get the kerosene! Don’t worry, burning wood for heat creates pollution – how long do you think it will be before you will not have THAT option. Well glory be, now I get it!!!! We will just build more nuclear energy plants which creative radioactive waste that we have to store SOMEWHERE. Is Boyd County still not available???? No, well how about Adams County . . . . right down by Hastings where good ‘ole Jane lives.
I don’t know about you but I would rather deal with an oil spill which is eventually absorbed by the environment (ask Louisiana) than nuclear waste which may stay in the soil AND the water AND the air until the end of time!!!! Yes sirree, we are really WELL equipped here to deal with a nuclear waste catastrophe! And with the financial woes in Washington, do you honestly believe that FEMA will be here with bells on to save the day?
What is wrong with this picture????? Do we have another “Hanoi Jane” on our hands but instead of her living in California and undermining our military in the Vietnam War, she has planted herself right smack in the middle of our fair state which is dealing with an energy crisis she apparently doesn’t begin to understand!! And what is more ironic to me is that there are NEBRASKANS who listen to her and don’t even question what HER success might mean to the rest of the State!