OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
COOKEVILLE, Tenn. | Not so long ago a congressman with seniority could fly off to Disneyland for a vacation during the campaign season. If he were the chairman of a committee his job would be safe enough that he could fly off to France for a cup of coffee with a croissant in a sidewalk cafe on the Champs-Elysees, getting no closer to the stump back home than reading about it in the papers.
Now almost no incumbent is safe, even in the South, where election to Congress was once a lifetime sinecure.
Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, serving his 13th term in the House, looks like a candidate safe in a sinecure: He’s chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, and his district includes two universities, Tennessee Tech and Middle Tennessee State. He has sponsored legislation to improve advanced technology studies, prevent teen suicide and to strengthen get-tough measures to deal with producers of the meth labs that proliferate in the Southern mountains. In short, he’s no radical. But he’s a Democrat, and that’s not a good thing to be this year. He retired to avoid a stiff re-election campaign and his seat is regarded as a cinch for Republican pickup.
In neighboring Arkansas, Blanche Lambert Lincoln, daughter of an old and prominent family in the Mississippi Delta and the new chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, has been written off by Arkansas Democrats in her campaign for what could have been an automatic second six-year term. With just under a month to go, her diehard supporters are trying to take courage in the latest polls that show her trailing by 14 points. That’s “good” news tempered by the fact that the previous polls showed her down by 27.
Several Democratic House committee chairmen, whose congressional tenure goes back to Noah and the Flood, are not necessarily in mortal peril but Republican challengers are clearly making them sweat for the first time in decades. If the Republicans prevail Nov. 2 as nearly everyone expects, the implications for 2012 are immense. “Facing redistricting,” says Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, a Republican, “many senior Democrats will retire in 2012, if we do things right.”
Who could have imagined Rep. Barney Frank in trouble in Massachusetts, where liberal platitudes are as holy scripture. But Mr. Frank, whose connection to the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac subprime disasters have persuaded many Massachusetts voters to regard him as one of the authors of the recession, is feeling the hot breath of a Republican challenger on the back of his neck. Good old Barney, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is one of several old bulls of the House who are ahead in the polls but polling perilously close to 50 percent approval. One or two old bulls have fallen below that.
Just being a Democrat is proof enough of guilt, of being an accessory before the fact if not of something worse. Rep. Jack Spratt of South Carolina is chairman of the House Budget Committee, and many of his constituents say he’s the Jack Spratt of fat with no appetite for lean. “Sure, they want to get me because I’m the chairman,” he tells Politico, the Capitol Hill political daily. “That’s the way to denounce our whole budget. I’m a high-value target, and I understand that.” So he’s running for his life.
The peril of committee chairmen in years like this one is not unprecedented. In the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, when Democrats lost 54 seats (and the speaker, Tom Foley), three committee chairmen were among the casualties. One of them, Dan Rostenkowski, the chairman of Ways and Means, was under indictment for fraud. Earlier, in the 1980 elections that brought Ronald Reagan and dozens of new Republicans to Washington, the Democratic chairman of Ways and Means was deposed, too.
For 17 terms — 34 years — Ike Skelton has seemed just the man for his district of farms and small towns in the middle of Missouri, a state in the middle of America. But he’s sweating, too, accused of being too closely allied with Nancy Pelosi, whom so many Middle Americans regard as “the wicked witch of the West.” Mr. Skelton has company in misery, but that’s no consolation when so many Americans have concluded that power corrupts, and the power of Democratic seniority has corrupted absolutely.
• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
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