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Jewish World Review
January 9, 2009
/ 12 Teves 5769
Tales From Longworth
By
David Broder
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
On the opening day of Congress, the elevator deposited me on the fifth floor of the Longworth House Office Building, where, as I expected, the parties celebrating hard-fought November election victories had spilled out of the offices and filled the corridor with revelry worthy of New Year's Eve.
The fifth floor of Longworth is not where you find the spacious suites commandeered by committee chairmen and senior members. The cramped offices here are occupied by freshmen, who draw numbers in a lottery and try to snag quarters close to the elevators. But on opening day, the friends and families who have arrived to launch the freshmen into their new careers self-consciously mix and mingle with folks from other states doing the same thing. It's a wonderful day, a reminder of all the hard work and sacrifice it takes to win a House seat when you're not an incumbent.
Every new member has his own story. Walt Minnick's is more unusual than most.
For one thing, he is only the second Democrat to hold his House seat in the past 42 years, and the first in 14 years to come to Washington from the famously Republican state of Idaho. For another, he is, at 66, much older than most of the other freshmen, but he ran and finished the Boston Marathon last year. Finally, he is the only former Nixon White House staff member to win election to this Congress. He resigned in protest immediately after the "Saturday Night Massacre," when Richard Nixon ousted his attorney general in order to remove Archibald Cox as the Watergate special prosecutor.
Minnick told me that he had just come out of the Army when a Harvard Law School classmate who was a White House fellow suggested he apply for a vacant job on Nixon's staff. Not yet 30, he was working anonymously on drug-control issues when Watergate broke. "I realized I was not comfortable serving that kind of president," he said, "so I became the second person on the staff to resign."
A native of eastern Washington and a lover of the outdoors, he chose Boise as his home and joined a forest products company, eventually becoming its president. Later, he started a successful nursery business.
Then politics came along. In 1996, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, then head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, recruited Minnick to run against Republican Sen. Larry Craig. "I was an independent, and I told him I wanted to run as an independent. He had no problem with that, but Cecil Andrus [the former Idaho governor and interior secretary] phoned me and said that if that was my plan, they'd run another Democrat against Craig and see that I finished third. So at that point I became a Democrat."
But Minnick still sees himself as someone who straddles party lines. Last fall, he found Idahoans "so fed up with the partisanship in Washington" that his message resonated. He had the advantage of being up against a highly partisan Republican, Rep. Bill Sali, who had feuded even with other Republicans and carved out one of the most conservative records in the House.
"My whole campaign was aimed at persuadable Republicans," Minnick told me. Fueled by $900,000 of his personal funds ("twice what I planned to put in"), Minnick closed his campaign with a series of ads in which Idahoans said, "I've been a Republican all my life, but I'm voting for Walt Minnick." It worked but barely. Minnick won with less than 51 percent of the vote.
This means, of course, that he will be high on the Republican target list for 2010. "Chris Van Hollen [the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] told me that I sit in the 14th most Republican district in the country, and the other 13 are all held by Republicans," Minnick said. "So he wants me home every weekend."
Minnick is following orders. He has taken a small apartment on Capitol Hill while his wife and children remain in Boise. He says he is ready to show his new constituents a different style of representation one not marked by partisanship.
He has joined the Blue Dog caucus of conservative Democrats and, on opening day, co-sponsored with Rep. Mike Simpson, the Republican from the neighboring district, a bill to protect an Idaho wilderness area.
His story is one of many and that's what makes opening day on Longworth Five a good place to be.
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Previously:
01/05/09: Missing A Few Sages
01/02/09: Illinois Outdoes Itself
12/29/08: The GOP Goes South
12/15/08: Health Reform's Moment
12/11/08: Long Path to a Fall in Illinois
12/08/08: Rescuing a college education
12/04/08: The danger of holdovers
11/31/08: Addressing the States' Dire Straits
11/28/08: Good time for a brainy president
11/24/08: Rising Hope For Fixing Health Care
11/19/08: A Force for Good but Not at State
11/17/08: GOP has work to do
11/13/08: Obama's good start
11/10/08: Governors Know Best
11/06/08: The Task Ahead
11/03/08: The Amazing Race: I thought 1960 was the best campaign I'd ever cover. But 2008 has that election beat
10/30/08: What We've Learned About McCain
10/27/08: A New England Brawl
10/23/08: Blue Sparks in Red Ohio
10/17/08: Obama's Assurance Policy
10/14/08: Live from the Pennsylvania frontlines
10/12/08: The proposals that could bind Obama
10/09/08: What do we really know about them?
10/06/08: The uplifting debate
10/02/08: Economics Exam in Michigan
09/28/08: McCain out-pointed Obama
09/26/08: Credibility Test for Congress
09/22/08: A debate's high stakes
09/22/08: Down days for McCain
09/15/08: The Next President's Due Bill
09/11/08: GOP celebration and Dem gloom are premature
09/08/08: Can we count on change?
09/03/08: Palin's Learning Curve
09/02/08: How Palin could help
09/02/08: What Happened to the Obama of 2004?
08/26/08: The Women Hit Their Mark
08/25/08: The Joe I know … and what it means for McCain
08/21/08: In N.H., a Deal to Close
08/18/08: Obama's Well-Oiled Machine
08/14/08: Pros and Conventions: Useful Ideas From the Stevensons and Friends
08/11/08: Rivals in Search of Trust
08/07/08: A Way Back to the High Road?
08/04/08: A Slate To Revive The Senate
07/31/08: When Congress Works
07/29/08: Management 101 for Senators
07/24/08: Obama's success abroad was pure luck
07/21/08: Obama's success abroad was pure luck
07/17/08: Governors offer real world wisdom. Obama and McCain would be wise to listen
07/14/08: Foes and allies strive to peg a shifty Obama
07/10/08: Fixing How We Go to War
07/07/08: Decider on the High Court
07/03/08: One Nation No More? Civics Needs a Boost, but Our Identity Endures
06/30/08: Dumbing Down the Presidency
06/26/08: Voting's Neglected Scandal
06/23/08: Why don't we know what makes Obama tick?
06/19/08: Foreign Policy's Best Hope
06/16/08: Perot, Back On the Charts
06/16/08: The Many Gifts of Tim Russert
06/12/08: Why Hillary played the womyn card
06/08/08: Eclipsed by the Adventures of Hillary
06/02/08: Obama in retreat
06/02/08: Reality vs. the Mythmakers
05/29/08: Hamilton Jordan's Message to Obama
05/27/08: Let the Veepstakes Begin
05/19/08: The mental exercise of placing Obama in the Oval Office requires more imagination than did moving Reagan from the silver screen to Pennsylvania Ave.
05/15/08: For Obama, a Lost Moment
05/12/08: The price of delay
05/08/08: Phoniness and inevitability
05/05/08: Winning by destruction: An insider reveals the Hillary game plan
05/01/08: Candidates' high-mindedness is rooted in religiosity; but Hillary and McCain don't have hater as inspiration
© 2008, by WPWG
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