If Barack Obama captures the West this November the man he should thank is Dan Kemmis.

Kemmis, head of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana,and the former Democratic mayor of Missoula and Speaker of the Montana House, was telling western Democrats in the early 1990s to ignore their national party and go their own way. Kemmis, espoused restoring power to the people and the places where they live.

That’s where he wanted Democrats to shift their attention. He was advocating a view that was more in line with Republican thinking at a time when Bill Clinton was the president and Democrats were in full control of the executive branch.

Kemmis always described himself as a liberal Democrat. The Harvard-educated Montana native, with his wavy white hair and tweed coats, looks more like a college professor than a ward-heeling politician.

But Kemmis was pushing for a new way to govern long before Obama had set foot in Montana. He was revolutionizing the concept of collaborative decisionmaking that has swept over the region in the last 15 years.

Kemmis said the bureaucratic, command-and-control government that has evolved in this country had built a barrier between decision makers and the people.

The system had encouraged people to disengage themselves from the decision making process, allowing them to increasingly rely on their leaders to make the decisions for them. When those decisions didn't meet their needs and desires, the public's contempt for the system grew and they become even more disengaged.

This process fed the Republican anti-government bent and allowed Republican leaders to take control of the West like they had not been able to do before. But when Kemmis was pushing these ideas in the 1990s it was Republicans like Sen. Mike Crapo and Newt Gingrich who were listening.

Agencies are moving away from the old process where they make a decision and then call a hearing, which became a battlefield where competing interests were encouraged to fight for their positions. Extremists bent on stopping their opponents are rewarded with gridlock, Kemmis said.

In this environment, Americans have lost their own skills and desire to work with each other, Kemmis says. As a youth, Kemmis remembers going to barn raisings in eastern Montana, where families all came together as a community. Avoiding people you did not like was not an option," he writes. "Everyone was needed by everyone else in one capacity or another."

Kemmis’ speeches, writings and leadership helped Westerners tap that spirit of cooperation and unleashed “the humane, democratic instincts" he believes exist in most Westerners on both sides of the political fence.

But with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House it was Democrats who were more open to his message in the new century. Farmers like Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and Montana Sen. Jon Tester, reengaged in politics and represented the radical middle of western politics that Kemmis promoted.

Kemmis’ views were unsettling to many environmentalists who had seen their interests ignored or attacked by state and local governments in the past. But today across the region and even across Idaho local and county governments are among the strongest supporters for addressing growth issues, water quality and open space. And many environmental groups are fully engaged.

The Bush administration’s efforts to open up vast portions of the West to oil and gas development, no matter what western neighbors of public lands had to say made Kemmis’ views resonate across the region. Most of all Kemmis challenged the view of many in our society who see themselves as taxpayers, not citizens.

“People who customarily refer to themselves as taxpayers are not even remotely related to democratic citizens," Kemmis wrote in his third book “The Good City and the Good Life.”

“What taxpayers do not do, and what people who call themselves taxpayers long since stopped even imaging themselves doing, is governing."

These are the powerful ideas that helped Democrats reshape themselves and their parties in the West. They have also been embraced by a new generation of Republicans who aren’t afraid to engage the same way.