NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Democrats add it up: GOP flukes are few
By David M. Shribman, Globe Columnist
WASHINGTON - Even with the holiday cheer on the radio and the colorful displays in the store windows, a dark, wintry gloom is settling on the Democratic Party. Poll results show strikingly positive ratings for the Republicans. President Bush retains strong support. Democratic leaders are already worrying about the party's prospects for 2004.
But the gravest indicator of the Democrats' plight is not in the public opinion polls or even at the polls in Louisiana. It is in the Senate, which in recent years has become a far more competitive political arena than the House, the body that the framers intended to track the whims of public opinion more closely.
Nearly a quarter-century ago, when the first modern Republican earthquake rumbled through the Senate, the GOP elected a group of ephemeral lawmakers to the chamber. The Ronald Reagan landslide of 1980 brought a few enduring figures to the Senate - Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire and Slade Gorton of Washington, for example - but most of their freshmen classmates are already long forgotten.
Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa has developed into a stolid figure, and Dan Quayle served a term as vice president, but James Abdnor of South Dakota, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, Steven D. Symms of Idaho, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, Mack Mattingly of Georgia, John P. East of North Carolina, and Paula Hawkins of Florida are all long gone. Most of them are remembered, if at all, as figures of ridicule.
Compare them with the freshmen of 2003. There is Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who has held two Cabinet positions, served as president of the American Red Cross, and run for president. There is Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who has served as a governor, university president, and Cabinet secretary and has run for president twice. There is John Cornyn of Texas, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and Texas attorney general. They are not likely to be transitory figures.
The younger members of the new freshman class are no political neophytes. There is John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, a serious-minded lawmaker who is only 38, but whose experience on the House budget and appropriations committees suggests he will have immediate impact in the Senate. There is Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who at 47 already has served four terms in the House and was a prominent figure in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, as a young Republican with doubts about the GOP's strategy. And there is Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who at 53 defeated former vice president Walter F. Mondale and who has eight years' experience as mayor of St. Paul.
Democrats who gathered in January 1981 to lick their wounds and serve in the minority for the first time in their lives were comforted by the conviction that many Republicans swept into office in the Reagan wave were accidental senators. Within months, Denton, East, and Hawkins were more prominent as punchlines on late-night television cabarets than they were in committee markups and floor debates.
By 1986, when that class of senatorial freshmen was up for reelection, East had decided not to run again; on June 29 of that year he committed suicide. Symms and Kasten were reelected, though they were destined to play minimal roles in the chamber, but five of the others were defeated.
If you need symbols of the weakness of that GOP freshman class, consider two sitting Democrats: Senate minority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Senator Bob Graham, outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. They both won their seats by defeating feckless Republicans in 1986.
Democrats harbor no such hopes as their new colleagues prepare to be sworn in a month from today. Only two new Republican senators are on shaky ground: Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, a state that is partial to one-term senators, and James M. Talent of Missouri, who has been in politics since he was 28 years old, but who lost a statewide race for governor only two years ago.
Of the two new Democratic senators, one, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, appears to be on the verge of a long political career. As a state attorney general with a father who was a governor and senator, Pryor has great statewide visibility.
But the other, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, will be 79 years old next month and walked away from the Senate once before. He was recruited out of retirement by the state's Democrats to replace Senator Robert G. Torricelli, whose ethical problems endangered his reelection. Lautenberg almost certainly will not run again, and there's no guarantee the Democrats will be able to hold that seat.
So as the new senators prepare their offices and gird to take their oaths, both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge that the new members will probably be around for quite a while. That suggests that in the Senate, Republican rule this time could be no fluke and no temporary condition.