Brendan Joel Kelley of the Anchorage Press [1] has a great profile of Mark Begich in today's issue of the weekly paper. Here's an excerpt from the article, where Mark talks about his attitude towards how to best get results when he's in the Senate:

“My job is to build a relationship. He’s a new Senator—there were ten new Senators two years ago, every single one of them should have been invited to Alaska, and they weren’t. Part of this is building new relationships, showing that we know how to do energy the right way. I think we need to repackage who we are as an energy state, redeliver it, and bring new converts over by doing that, not just pounding our fists on the table.”

His opponent, Senator Ted Stevens, who’s approaching his fortieth anniversary as a Senator, has been trying to get ANWR drilled for years, and says that his seniority and clout in the Senate are why he should be reelected. Unsurprisingly, Begich sees it differently:

“In the last three [election] cycles, if you include this one, twenty-five to thirty percent of the U.S. Senate will have changed hands; the seniority issue is changing rapidly. The move through the ranks is very fast, it’s easy to do these days.”

He cites first-term Senators Jim Webb of Virginia, Ken Salazar of Colorado, and Tester as examples of senators who have a different view of how to get things done. “The style of today, the new folks who are getting elected, are all about getting results, working across party lines—not playing these party politics where if you don’t do the right thing they wedge against you or they leverage against you, that’s just a different style of the past.”