It’s fitting that Ross Baker ambles the halls of Congress in a year we are taking the national census. Like a diligent enumerator in a city neighborhood or rural hamlet, Baker surfaces only rarely, takes diligent notes and then exits to make sense of it all.
“The first time I was here I was 37 years old, and I thought then that I was on the high end of the age scale,” he said last week. “Now, I feel like Methuselah.”
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He then cited the office of one U.S. senator that has a 30-year-old legislative director and many staffers in their 20s. “The youth of the people is staggering. The amount of work they do is daunting. There’s a lot of energy and dedication.
“But,” he says with the acid edge of an academic, “there’s not a whole lot of wisdom, and there’s very little perspective.”
Baker, 60, is a political science professor at New Jersey’s Rutgers University and a generally unrecognized staple of journalism: the ever-handy Ivory Tower commentator involved in a mutually beneficial relationship with reporters.
They need comments and context from outsiders, while he needs a link to the present, an immediacy that can be lacking in library stacks. Check out a fair number of political stories and you’ll find Baker, “a presidential scholar at Rutgers University.”
In fact, he is more a student of Congress than of the presidency and has published works including “Friend and Foe in the U.S. Senate” (Free Press), a look at the role of personal relationships in the workings of the Senate, and “House and Senate” (W.W. Norton), a comparison of the two bodies.
It’s why the Philadelphia native and Navy veteran, who had planned to be an African studies specialist until he found opportunity limited because he is white, is back in town for the fourth extended stay in nearly 25 years. He switched fields long ago and, given the good fortune of having tenure, he gets a year off–a sabbatical–every six or seven years.
Since 1976, that generally has meant coming back here to work on Capitol Hill and soak in the institution, carrying a sense of history that was again handy last week when, amid claims of a triumphant and back-slapping return, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) returned from his ballyhooed, if losing, presidential campaign.
“He will find it difficult to reconnect with the Senate and to experience the scorn and derision of colleagues for having the effrontery to think of himself as president,” Baker said.
The assessment found its real origin in Baker’s very first long-term stay, in 1975-76, when he initially worked for Sen. Walter Mondale, the Minnesota Democrat who failed in his bid for the party’s presidential nomination. “Right after he dropped out, he found coming back to the Senate very difficult,” Baker said. Mondale did become Jimmy Carter’s running mate and as such vice president.
The political tourist moved on to writing speeches for Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, who was still in the presidential hunt. But after Bayh lost the Massachussetts primary (only trivia buffs might recall that Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington won), he dropped out, prompting Baker to go on to assist another soon-to-fail Democratic aspirant, Sen. Frank Church of Idaho.
In 1982-83 he was back to labor for the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives. It proved engrossing because Ronald Reagan was president and the Democrats were discombobulated, fighting about matters such as whether the 1984 convention should be in San Francisco given the implications.
It was then that a centrist push, led by Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri and then-Rep. Al Gore of Tennessee, led to crafting a new party doctrine, which itself gave rise to the Democratic Leadership Council. The centrist alternative to the liberal wing ultimately would be personified by an Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton.
His next sabbatical, in 1995, didn’t go smoothly for various reasons and was not especially productive. So this time, the lifelong Democrat decided to try a more bipartisan tack and wrote to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who had impressed him.
Unfortunately, Hagel was national chairman of McCain’s campaign and when it took off, so did he, frequently. Because Baker’s time was limited, he contacted a friend, who put him in touch with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and quickly a deal was done.
Basically, Baker gets to prowl about with Leahy and staff, even doing some writing for the senator. Leahy is involved in a fair number of notable issues, including pushing legislation to require preservation of DNA evidence at crime scenes and allow Death Row inmates to use DNA testing to prove their possible innocence (partly inspired by Illinois’ moratorium on executions).
Leahy also is getting Baker’s help in assembling an archive on the tumultuous impeachment of President Clinton and his Senate trial. Leahy was an aggressive Clinton defender.
Overall, Baker has a sense of tremendous change, and much of it not for the good.
Clearly, the average age of staffers is down considerably. Whereas in the 1970s most seemed to be in their late 20s or mid-30s, now the vast majority are in their 20s. He has a sense of people “hired due to their energy and dedication, not so much their perspective and ability to reflect.”
And the institution of Congress itself seems to offer more disincentives to reflect. “Reflective people don’t do real well. Look at [Bill] Bradley,” he said, alluding to his presidential campaign but also to the political process as a whole.
“People like him are seen as irresolute. There is a premium on action, and sometimes the quality of debate suffers.”
On even a cosmetic level, he senses less of a difference between many Republican and Democratic senators. For instance, he notes that there is little to distinguish their offices from one another. “They all have the same icons, the same model airplanes presented by defense contractors, the same Western motif statues by Frederick Remington, the same testimonials,” he says. There are few partisan differences.”
What also struck me as curious was his sense that there are fewer true legislators, people interested and able to write, manage and pass new laws.
He knows he runs the peril here of getting a bit too nostalgic, but he is convinced that the “craft of legislation has fallen on hard times.” Those he deems “the virtuosos” of the past, including former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and former Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana, have few counterparts now.
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Yes, yes, he concedes, there are some, including Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), but nowhere near as many as before.
And, as far as the institution’s overall quality, he is not impressed.
“I guess maybe it’s because Congress is an apt reflection of the American people,” he said. “There are individuals of surpassing excellence and people of shocking mediocrity. There are people who work hard and those who goof off.
“There are people for whom seniority is a blessing, but others who are mere time-servers.”
“And there are people who, quite remarkably, have maintained a measure of personal humility,” said the academic, who’ll soon be returning again to his regular haunt, “and others who are morbidly addicted to the flatteries of their staffs.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.