BRAD OWEN HAS a new beard. It’s not the glorious face sweater of a mountain hermit, not the five o’clock half-measure of an aging hipster trying to look nonchalant. It’s an everyday well-trimmed beard, remarkable only for a shock of white on the chin that lends him a gravitas that the thinning gunmetal hair on top of his head doesn’t.

The 59-year-old Owen grew out his beard on a hunting trip last November, after he held off Republican challenger Marcia McCraw to win a fourth term as Washington’s lieutenant governor. When he got back from the woods Linda, his wife of 26 years, dug the butch look so much, she bought him a beard trimmer for Christmas. Owen is a Democrat, but when I asked him about the beard in March, he joked that he’s “such a right-wing, redneck conservative from rural Washington” that he won’t shave until he gets his $29.99 worth out of that trimmer. It was a half-serious response to a half-serious question—and a not-so-veiled shot at liberals who think he’s redder than he is blue. But if you read between the whiskers, it’s not a wild leap to surmise that after a career battling irrelevance, he’s decided he doesn’t have much to lose.

Last spring, when Representative Helen Sommers retired after 36 years in the statehouse, Owen became the longest-serving elected official in Washington state government. He was 26 when he began a 20-year run in the legislature in 1977. Then, in 1997, in the middle of his fourth term as a senator, he left for the lieutenant governor’s office. Of the 43 active lieutenant governors in the country, he’s served the longest.

So what does he do on the taxpayer’s dime? Constitutionally speaking, not much: The lieutenant governor rules on parliamentary procedure in the Senate and steps in if the governor leaves the state temporarily or vacates the office. Owen has expanded the office’s role, making himself the state’s unofficial trade commissioner; he considers missions overseas a high point of the job. But some skeptics think those responsibilities hardly justify his $94,000 salary and his office’s $1.7 million budget. His job is “a waste of money, and it’s archaic,” says Ruth Bennett, a Libertarian who ran against Owen in 2000 promising that if she won, she’d work to eliminate the office—and that was long before the state’s current fiscal crisis. “It’s a useless appendage, and it should be trimmed so the money could be put to better use.”

And that’s not counting what those critics think of his ability to perform his primary duty. In January, Governor Chris Gregoire fell off the media’s radar for a day, and political bloggers went bananas wondering if she was interviewing for a job in President Obama’s cabinet. Then came news she’d merely visited Iraq, but not before blog commenters panicked at the thought of Owen taking the state’s reins. Even Owen seems to get a little sweaty-palmed at the prospect. When I asked if he ever imagines becoming Governor Owen, he noted the recent abrupt exits of governors in New York and Illinois. “When something happens in another state, that’s when you normally think about it—‘Oh golly, that could happen here!’ But we’re prepared.” He paused, and then, as if to reassure me—or himself—repeated it: “We’re prepared.”

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Owen can’t even catch a break from fellow Democrats in the Senate. He calls himself a “rules junkie,” so he’s able to occasionally find fun in his other constitutional role, ruling on things like the relevance of amendments to Senate bills. But last year that zest for procedure blew up in his face, when the Senate voted 25-21 to reenact an expired liquor tax. That was fine, as far as the state constitution was considered, but a 2007 voter-approved initiative, Tim Eyman’s I-960, said tax increases required a two-thirds majority. Owen had to decide which took precedence. He conferred with the lawyers who sit with him at the rostrum, broke the huddle, and ruled that the measure had failed…and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sued him. The case went to the state Supreme Court, which this spring declined to rule on it, almost ensuring that Owen will referee more Senate-floor showdowns over taxes. “I didn’t necessarily agree with the approach taken by Mr. Eyman,” he said after the court’s nonruling. “But I have to abide by what the law says.… Either way you go, you’re disappointing a group of people, and nobody likes to do that.”

Such opportunities for legislative drama are few and far between, and you can tell he’s getting bored with his everyday responsibilities. “Needless to say, the conversation around the house on occasion is about retirement,” he said when I asked why he’s stayed in Olympia for three decades—before quickly adding, “But I’m not announcing that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know yet.” Just one thing still seems to light him up: Strategies for Youth, the nonprofit he and Linda started 20 years ago. A dozen or so times a year, he visits schools and delivers an hourlong rock and roll–style pitch urging kids to steer away from drugs and bullying. He’s taken hits for that, too, from people who roll their eyes at the idea of a middle-aged man channeling Chuck Berry in grade school gymnasiums. But he genuinely doesn’t seem to care.

What does the lieutenant governor have to do for the state? Not much.

I followed Owen to a gig at Jenkins Creek Elementary in Kent this spring and, if nothing else, admired his complete lack of self—consciousness. A couple hundred kids sat on the auditorium floor as he danced around them, warbling off-key into his Madonna-style headset; Linda projected images of celebrities and athletes who had overcome inadequacies or said no to drugs. “Many kids tell us they’re teased or bullied or harassed,” he declaimed. “Maybe they’re small, like I was in school, or heavy, like Rosie O’Donnell.”

The PowerPoint show jammed, and Owen forgot half the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” But the kids stood and cheered when he finished with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” After he thanked them, educational assistant Tracie Watson addressed the still-standing students. “Let’s all thank Mr. Owens,” she said. And then, before Owen could correct the surname slip, she asked, without a hint of irony, “Now, what quality did he demonstrate when his slides didn’t work and he had trouble with his presentation?”

A little hand shot up: “Perseverance?”

“That’s right,” said the teaching assistant. “He persevered.”