Reporter-News Staff Writer

In chasing his impossible dream, Quixote, the bumbling knight of literary lore, could persuade only his faithful servant Sancho Panza to follow him.

Monde, by contrast, has hundreds of people boosting her long-shot quest to oust veteran 17th District Congressman Charles Stenholm from office -- not to mention $50,000 or so in campaign funding. It's by far a record amount for a Libertarian congressional candidate in Texas.

On Nov. 7, she'll find out whether her campaign also attracts record voter support for a candidate of her persuasion.

Although a vivacious and gregarious woman who plainly relishes talking to people one-on-one or in groups, an earlier version of herself would have scoffed at the idea of running for political office.

She grew up in a nominally Democratic Midwestern household but in college and medical school was completely tuned out and turned off by politics. That is, until she met and started dating a convinced and committed Libertarian named George Schwappach.

Humoring her boyfriend by taking the World's Smallest Political Quiz,'' she found herself diagnosed as a Libertarian. The importance of that distinction would become clear in time.

The couple decided to marry and start a family. Monde completed medical school in 1989 and spent a three-year residency in Columbus, Ohio. After that, the family packed up and headed west to California's Central Valley.

Monde joined a family practice in Manteca, Calif., but soon grew frustrated with the amount of government regulation of medicine plus the demands of the burgeoning health maintenance organization system.

But what most crystallized her growing adherence to Libertarian philosophy was what she saw as an intolerable attempt to increase government's already intrusive role in medicine: the Clinton administration's proposed health program that first lady Hillary Clinton tried to put together and enact in 1993-94.

I give Hillary all the credit,'' she says sardonically.

As a Libertarian, Monde contends that drastically shrinking government and slashing taxes would greatly ease some of society's most persistent and pressing problems. She favors returning choice to individuals in such areas as funding their own retirement and choosing schools for their children. The family moved to Abilene in 1994, choosing the city for its family-friendly atmosphere and its evident independent-mindedness.

She said her husband would attend Rotary Club meetings in towns the couple was considering, and sat at the table with the oldest member.

Her staunch opposition to government intervention in medicine, combined with alarm that politicians who believe just the opposite would never retreat from their position, moved her steadily on a path toward her jump into politics as a participant.

After filing for office last January, Monde got on the phone and raised $7,500 within hours.

A difficult upbringing

A bubbly, energetic woman of sunny disposition, Monde came out of an unstable childhood that much of the time was anything but cheery.

Born 37 years ago in Tucson, Ariz., she never knew her birth parents. She was adopted as an infant by a couple from the Ohio-Pennsylvania area who couldn't give birth to children. The couple had moved to Arizona to try to repair the broken health of her adoptive father, Raymond Monde.

Ironically, her mother, Theresa, died first, from a brain tumor that initially manifested itself as recurring headaches. Her daughter was 4. At age 7, Monde lost her father and was shuffled off to the first of a series of foster homes over three or four years.

I was running away all the time, heading up to the mountains,'' she recalled.

She also was headed for trouble, such as a possible early pregnancy or trouble with the law, she believes.

She finally wound up with relatives as her father had intended. With her older brother, who was also adopted, she joined a stern, somewhat cold Polish Catholic family in Erie, Pa. There she grew to adulthood in a Polish neighborhood of the Abilene-sized, Great Lakes city that also boasted Irish and German ethnic neighborhoods.

As a child, she resolved to make medicine a career, though at first tending to animals was her choice.

After growing up and finding how much she liked people -- reinforced partly through volunteering at three different hospitals -- she switched her aim from veterinary school to medical school.

'I have already won'

Campaigning in Sweetwater on an early October day, Monde demonstrates the validity of her claim.

It may not have been her most efficient day on the campaign trail, but it was one of the most varied.

She began with a lengthy radio interview that must have been heard by most everyone in town judging from the number of people who later told her, Oh, yeah, I heard you on the radio.''

She attended a birthday party in a bank break room. She strolled over to a Chamber of Commerce gathering. She walked the halls of the Nolan County Courthouse and attended a cattle sale at Sweetwater Livestock Auction.

And she ended her campaign day buttonholing Texas State Technical College students to distribute campaign literature and her spiel on why she merits their votes.

At the auction, she tries to slow a hulking cowboy down to pitch for his vote.

Oh, I can't. I got in trouble a few years back ', he says, hardly breaking stride.

She tries to tell him what she's just learned from a probation officer: Anyone who completes a felony sentence, including probation or parole, regains the right to vote. The cowboy hurries on.

Guiding her around Sweetwater was Kat Jones, a peppery woman of middle years who seemed to know a fair majority of everyone they met.

Jones is a former Stenholm supporter who chunked her support of the Abilene Democrat over the House banking scandal of 1992. Stenholm was one of scores of congressmen who had written checks without sufficient funds to cover them under generous no-bounce provisions of that now-defunct bank.

Ordinary folks would've gone to jail, Jones snorted.

Though Jones' political views don't line up solidly Libertarian on all issues, she's plainly sold on Monde.

She just mesmerizes me,'' Jones said. She is so smart. I can look at her and see the wheels clicking.

The way she projects her ideals -- she's down on everybody's level. She's not up here,'' Jones added, gesturing with hands above her head.

Monde often introduces herself as the candidate with principles,'' which might well rile Stenholm and Republican challenger Darrell Clements. But she has gone to some lengths to fit principle to practice in her own life:

She believes in separation of state and school,'' so she and her husband have home-schooled the older two of their three sons, though the middle boy now attends a private school because his parents believe it best fits his needs.

Not only is government funding unnecessary to ensure access to education for all children, she contends, it doesn't even guarantee such access. Poor children left with no choice besides attending failing schools essentially lack access to education, in her view.

She envisions privately funded schools, supported by a growing number of private scholarship programs, leading the way to educational access for all.

She is opposed to government-financed and -regulated medicine, so a few years ago she stopped seeing Medicare patients, hard as she said it was to end the relationships.

She believes a wedding needs only the blessing of God, not the sanction of the state. So she and husband George were wed in a religious ceremony, but did not obtain a marriage license. Though state law recognizes the validity of unions of mutual consent, Monde says she does not recognize the legitimacy of state authority in the matter.

At times, Monde seems to grant herself a real shot at winning the race -- if all breaks right in a three-sided race with Stenholm and Clements. Other times, she reflects the conventional wisdom that a third-party candidate stands little chance, but without a trace of defeatism.

If her candidacy influences the outcome of the race without winning, she'll take that as a major advancement.

A sizable vote total would heighten the Libertarian Party's visibility, enhancing its ability to attract voters and financing in the future, she figures. That should speed the day of a much smaller government, financed by much lower taxes and limited to functions the Constitution explicitly authorizes, she hopes.

I have already won this race, she declares, by being on the ballot.