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United States News Title: A Senate of iconoclasts? A Senate of iconoclasts? By JONATHAN MARTIN | 6/23/10 5:24 AM EDT Utah Senate hopeful Mike Lee and a handful of other conservative insurgents believe that that village of Washington can only be saved by destroying it. AP Tuesday's nomination of Mike Lee for the Senate by Utah Republicans served up yet another reminder about what this tumultuous and unpredictable election year might mean for next year’s Congress: The decorous and staid U.S. Senate could get a lot rowdier in 2011. Lee, a 38-year-old conservative lawyer who enjoyed support from tea party activists, is all but certain to fill the seat of 76-year-old Sen. Robert Bennett, the sober institutionalist and senator’s son who failed to even make his party’s primary ballot after three terms. The transition from septuagenarian Bennett to Lee, who is younger than anyone else currently in the chamber, may be the most vivid illustration of how the next Senate could veer further from its clubby and collegial tradition, but it’s hardly the only example. A handful of other Republicans fueled by tea party activists might also end up in the Senate, intent on doing more than carving their names in the desks and sampling the dining room’s famous bean soup. They owe little to the establishment—party leaders largely opposed their candidacies—and much to the fear-for-my-country movement from which they emerge. Many of them haven’t followed the timeworn paths to elected office. Perhaps most important, they aren’t expecting to come to the capital to go along so they can get along. They are non-conformists who tend to chafe at authority, with both Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada making names for themselves by bucking the established order. Among other things, Paul founded a rebel organization of ophthalmologists. Angle, who was known for her habit of being the lone member of the legislature to vote against a variety of measures, launched an unsuccessful primary challenge against one of the most powerful members of the Nevada state Senate in her last race. Along with Lee in Utah and a handful of other conservative insurgents still locked in primaries, these hopefuls believe that that village of Washington can only be saved by destroying it– or at least returned to what they see as first principles. Plum committee assignments and party leadership posts are not the lure for these candidates. Rather, they view their campaigns as rescue missions in which the overriding objective is to drastically reduce the size of the federal government. Yet it’s not just this band of populist conservatives who would add some color to the Senate’s white marble and ubiquitous gray suits. As if the combination of Paul and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell wasn’t an odd-enough state pairing in Kentucky, consider the two Democratic senators Florida could have in Washington: the gentlemanly Bill Nelson, who began working in politics as an aide to former Gov. Reubin Askew in 1971 after getting out of the Army, alongside Jeff Greene, who moved to the state two years ago after getting rich on the collapse of the housing market and establishing a name for himself among the Los Angeles party crowd. The new and unlikely faces that could populate the Senate next year reflect the fury of an electorate that is scornful of the political status quo and hungry for change. And at a time of serious churning among voters, it’s easier for politicians who don’t look and sound like the usual models to get elected. 2010 won’t mark the first election cycle that a collection of unlikely individuals joined the chamber of Clay and Webster. “It's 1980 all over again,” said Rutgers University professor and Senate scholar Ross Baker. “Paula Hawkins, Jeremiah Denton, John East, Steve Symms—the Four Horsemen of the Reagan Apocalypse ride again. A rebellious electorate embraces crackpots and crackpots with certificates of election make public policy.” As voters directed their anger toward President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by electing Ronald Reagan, they also ushered in a class of senators mostly remembered for, well, being swept in by Carter and Reagan. Among the list that helped the GOP capture the Senate majority that year: Hawkins of Florida, Denton of Alabama, East of North Carolina and Symms of Idaho. Their presence – and the departure of such Democratic stalwarts as Idaho’s Frank Church, South Dakota’s George McGovern, Washington’s Warren Magnuson and Indiana’s Birch Bayh – underlined that the new right was on the ascent. But even though these and the other Reagan Revolutionaries came to Washington intent on overthrowing what they saw as a crumbling citadel of liberalism, they didn’t ultimately succeed in storming the tower. Six years later, Democrats re-claimed control of the Senate. “The best insight came from [former Kansas Sen.] Bob Dole, who said after the 1980 election something like, ‘If we had known we would have a majority, we'd have run better candidates,’” quipped Adam Clymer, a former Senate chronicler for the New York Times. Some lost or didn’t seek re-election after a single term – having proved their point or voters realizing that they proved theirs – but others traded pitchforks for loafers. “The ones that came in with chips on their shoulder saying, ‘I’m going to tell you guys how to make this place better didn’t do much to affect the process,’” recalled former Sen. William Brock, the Tennessee Republican who served both in the Senate and as Republican National Committee chair in 1980. “But some of them found out that there is a system – and that you can be different and still work within the system.” For example, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a hog farmer turned congressman, retained an iconoclastic streak while rising to become chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Still, some longtime Senate-watchers fret about this year’s crop of potential senators, noting that comity in the body is already far worse now than it was 30 years ago. “What we’re seeing is that the mood of the public tends to generate extremists on both sides now,” lamented former Sen. John Breaux, a centrist Democrat from Louisiana. “People that want to come to Washington to burn the barn down as opposed to fixing the system.” Breaux, who is now a powerful lobbyist, said the self-styled outsiders would discover how difficult it is to change the body once they get inside. “Should they get there, they’re going to find out they’re in a distinct minority of a minority in terms of wanting to do away with the current system,” he predicted. “They’ll find out that you cannot change overnight a system of government we’ve had for over 200 years.” But Brock said the idea of a group of neophytes taking to the genteel “upper chamber” was refreshing. “This is what we want in politics,” he said. “People not there for a career but there because they care about what’s going on and want to make a difference.” As in 1980, Brock said: “This is what happens when there is a very strong feeling that the country is off-track.” Not all outsiders succeed in such years – recall Iran-Contra figure Oliver North in Virginia, who lost a three-way race to Sen. Charles S. Robb in 1994 – but enough always do to, at least temporarily, take some of the starch out of the Senate. “Political waves sometimes bring strange life forms to the Capitol’s shores,” is how Claremont McKenna professor John Pitney put it.
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#1. To: All (#0)
November can't get here soon enough.
#2. To: Badeye (#1)
Ten bucks says that you don't know what the word "iconoclast" means [without looking it up].
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