Wes Vernon
Friday, Nov. 5, 2004

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  Liberal lawmakers from “Flyover Country” have had to learn the hard way the art of paying lip service to the values of the “folks back home” when revisiting Main Street, and talking differently when they’re in the halls of power. After all, it is the liberals who control the media, academia and — most importantly - the campaign coffers of the left.

Outgoing (Yessss!) Senator Daschle joins an impressive list of politicians whose Potomac Fever caught up with them after many years of wheeling and dealing with the establishment elitists in Hollywood, Georgetown and the upper East and West sides of Manhattan.

Space does not allow us to detail all of the many examples. Here are some the highlights.

The most recent high profile example is Tom Foley, the last of a long string of Speakers of the House over the forty-year period (1954-1994) when the Democrats controlled that chamber.

Tom Foley was elected to Congress in 1964 during the “Goldwater debacle” (a term liberals have turned into a cliché, notwithstanding that Barry Goldwater’s losing candidacy ultimately paved the way for Ronald Reagan).

The young Washington State lawmaker won in a normally conservative Republican district. After he arrived in the nation’s capitol, Foley attempted to protect his right flank by emphasizing his association with that state’s then junior senator, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, whose hawkish views of communism were never in doubt.

As the years wore on, and especially after Jackson died in 1982, Foley apparently concluded that his future in the Democratic party was linked to those on its left side, which had gained increasing influence since the McGovern presidential bid.

So he trimmed his sails enough to work his way up the ladder of the House hierarchy to become Speaker after Jim Wright was brought down by scandal in 1989.

In 1994, when conservative uprisings were on a coast-to-cast roll, the Washington D.C. Tom Foley finally caught up with the Spokane Tom Foley, and the result was that the folks back home decided he had lost touch. So they fired him

Then there was Senator Frank Church, elected to the “world’s most deliberative body” in 1956, as the shining new beacon of youth whose baby-face pictures had a noticeable effect on some women voters.

For all the cautious pseudo-conservative noises that Frank Church made, his voting record was firmly on the left.

And who were his constituents? His press secretary in the late Sixties-early Seventies bluntly told me that the senator “has two constituencies” (his very words!) — the voters back in Idaho and the fundraising backers in New York. The reality was that the folks back home got the rhetoric, while the New York fundraisers got the action.

In the 1970’s, Church played on post-Watergate hysteria to hold lengthy hearings on the sins (real or imagined) of the CIA. The end result was legislation that emasculated this nation’s intelligence services. We paid the price for that many times over — most spectacularly on 9/11.

Finally in 1980, after seeing with their own eyes the damage that was done, the constituents in Idaho sent their veteran senator packing. Suddenly, denizens of the salons of Georgetown, Beverly Hills, and Park Avenue were saying, “Frank who?”

We could revisit the 1950’s when the voters of Arizona could see that the early 20th Century rural populism of the western states Democratic Party had morphed into the tool of the Washington inner circles. So in 1952, they gave their “prestigious” Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland the old heave-ho. They had the audacity to replace him with a young whipper-snapper named Barry Goldwater.

Apparently, McFarland had not profited from the experience (two years earlier) of his predecessor as Democrat Senate Leader. That senator from Illinois, Scott Lucas, got his comeuppance from the voters in 1950 after he used his position to try - without success - to force Senator Joe McCarthy to shut-up about communists in the State Department.

People in Illinois wanted to know who in government was betraying their country. Perhaps that struck Lucas as strange since everyone he knew on the Washington “A-list” social circuit hated McCarthy.

Illinoisans replaced Lucas with Everett Dirksen, labeled by some as “the Wizard of Ooze” because of his smooth as silk orations.

Most famously Dirksen blew the whistle on the Washington pork-barrel racket by saying, “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon, you’re talking about real money!”

Less famously, but no less typical for him, was when Dirksen listened patiently at a press conference to a convoluted inquiry from an eastern media type. Whereupon, the Wizard of Ooze proclaimed in his unique baritone, “What a stupid question!”

Not every “home-grown” boy who gets carried away with Potomac fever has hailed from the “Flyover Country” in the mid-American Red States. The east coast state of Maryland — right next door to Washington - canned their veteran Senator Millard Tydings in the same year Lucas got the pink slip.

Tydings chaired a stacked committee that tried to deep-six McCarthy and his charges. Marylanders saw through it, and ended his 24-year Senate career. As Morris Beale, author of “Red Rat Race” said in his book, “It was bad tidings for Millard” on election night, and the senior senator was left with “a scowl on his face” that had not disappeared since then.

Bottom line: All the above “very important people” were replaced by better men who did not forget who sent them to represent their interests. One of the worst things a politician can do is to get the idea that he is indispensable.

Daschle was brought down when his high profile obstructionism made front pages everywhere, including Sioux Falls and environs. It was he who led the Democrat charge in the Senate to filibuster indiscriminately a healthy share of the Bush agenda. If the cause of blocking the president could be served, Daschle gave no quarter. So South Dakotans replaced him with former Congressman John Thune.

Free Congress Foundation President Paul Weyrich tells NewsMax he believes the Democrats, now smaller in number and with their hard-charging leader gone, may think twice before they play the obstructionist game. That test will likely come when President Bush makes his first Supreme Court nomination.

It is customary for the Senate leadership to appoint junior senators to the boring task of presiding over the often marathon sessions. If the Democrats in the Senate try to follow the Daschle filibuster recipe, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist would do well to assign freshman Senator Thune to preside over that debate. It would serve as a reminder of what can happen when very important people lose touch with the folks who sent them to Washington.