For those of us who are old enough to remember 1994, I’m sure Tuesday night reminded most of us of those dark days. Me too, but for slightly different reasons. The conventional wisdom holds that the polls didn’t turn decisively against the Democrats until September of that year. You may well have heard some armchair pundit say that at some point. I have, several times. While that may be true (I honestly don’t remember for certain), I can tell you with complete certainty that Democrats who were paying attention knew trouble was brewing much earlier that summer. I know, because I was an intern that summer on Capitol Hill, in the office of Rep. Paul Kanjorski. The coming storm was palpable in political circles on the Hill, and in the attitudes of Kanjorski’s constituents.
Elections were not really on my mind when I arrived in DC in May 1994. Two things were on my mind: delight at being in DC at last, and pride to be serving the citizens of PA-11. Although I grew up in New Hampshire and went to college in Iowa (go ahead with your "you must be running for president" joke if you want, but I guarantee I’ve heard it before), Northeast Pennsylvania has always been a second home for me. My family has roots there going back to around 1876, when my great-great grandparents arrived from Ireland. My parents landed back there after Dad retired from the Army when I was two years old, and my earliest memories are of our apartment in Edwardsville (just across the river from Wilkes-Barre). After we moved to NH when I was six, I never tired of coming back to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents in the summer and basking in the nostalgia for a place I could barely remember.
My parents had moved back to the area right after I finished high school, but by then I was off to Iowa. Three years later, building upon a few years of activism there and an internship at the State Senate in Des Moines, I was fortunate enough to be selected for an internship in Kanjorski’s office. Though inexperienced, I was tremendously eager when I got to DC late that spring. I was sure it was to be the best summer of my life.
And it was one of the best. Without a doubt, I learned a lot. Some of what I learned was good, some bad, but even the bad things were important lessons to be learned. Most importantly, I learned a great deal about the realities of legislation and politics. And – something most Hill staffers learn sooner or later – working for a politician with whom you do not always agree. Kanjorski wasn’t bad from my point of view on economic issues, and he had some great ideas when it came to environmental reforms for the mining-scarred lands of his district. But he was very, very conservative on social issues, and I knew from the beginning that would be tough for me to deal with.
I now know that I didn’t appreciate how difficult it would be. Fact is, though, it is called the House of Representatives for a reason, and Kanjorski’s harsh social conservatism was in fact a fairly mild strain of what we got from his constituents every day. Remember, this was 1994: health care was on the agenda, and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy was still just revving up. Day after day after day, we interns fielded phone calls from home, each one more vicious than the last, lashing out at abortion, "socialized medicine," gays, feminists and of course both Clintons. I’d known there was a lot of hardcore social conservatism out there, but until that summer I didn’t realize just how widespread and angry it really was. Nor did I recognize that there were people on our side of the aisle who acquiesced in such things. But there were, and I had to learn very quickly to respect them, or at least pretend to. I also got an early and very strong taste of what the entire country was in for with the next Congress!
I still remember the directive our intern coordinator gave us on our first day in the office: "Always be polite to the callers no matter how nasty they are with you." I laughed, and got a knowing look in response. Fortunately, I had worked at a fast food joint in Wilkes-Barre a couple of summers before, and was used to handling venom, much of it probably from the very same people. For years afterwards, the two experiences ran together seamlessly in my dreams: "I don’t want my tax dollars going to get a baby’s legs chopped off and his head crushed, and these fries are terrible!!" The other interns were just as liberal as I was, and we found our share of ways to cope, often by telling each other what we wished we could tell the constituents: "That’s right, we ARE coming to get your gun! Abortion rights forever! Yeah!"
It wasn’t always so funny, of course. For one thing, we did have to keep our opinions to ourselves among the other staff, many of whom apparently did share Kanjorski’s old-man conservatism. I learned this in no uncertain terms on a Monday. That weekend, I had been hanging around Dupont Circle when I saw a man crossing the street. He was wearing a skirt (not all that unusual on Dupont Circle), and just before he reached the far side of the crosswalk, a car roared through a red light and barely missed hitting him, clearly on purpose. Back at the office on Monday and still feeling outraged on the guy’s behalf, I told this story to a couple of legislative aides. Their response: "You mean he was wearing a skirt?!" No apparent concern for the fact that he’d nearly been murdered because of that. It was then I knew that it was DC outside, but when you stepped into our office you were in Wilkes-Barre.
Distasteful as I found some of his constituents’ attitudes, I figured Kanjorski was just bowing down to the realities of his district. From what I observed of him up close, I got the impression that he really did agree with it in any case. Like the social-issues right in general, he was grumpy and angry much of the time, and didn’t seem to have much time for anybody who saw the world any differently than he did. (To some extent, this spilled over onto his staff, a few of whom routinely snapped at us interns when we had done nothing wrong.) So I had no problem believing he was also homophobic and insecure about women’s rights. In any case, when I went back to Iowa that fall, I chalked it all up to political expediency and the sad reality that bigotry was still quite pervasive among older Americans. (PA-11 had, and possibly still has, the highest median age outside Florida.)
Remember, most of the Democrats who lost in 1994 were me-too Republicans who gave left-of-center voters in their districts little reason to support them, while most true-blue liberal Democrats did just fine that year. When Kanjorski bucked the Republican landslide and won a sixth term with 74% of the vote that fall, I interpreted that as a sign that he was simply representing his Democratic, but very conservative constituency; a rare case of a me-too Republican whose constituents were also of that breed. I didn’t like it, but at least he was a vote against Speaker Gingrich.
That Kanjorski effortlessly weathered the storm of 1994, but was brushed aside this year, is no doubt a meaningful anecdote about the difference between 1994 and 2010. I don’t know just what it is, and I suspect it will be a while before anybody can say for sure just what the difference is. What I do know is that, while I’m sorry the Dems lost their House majority, I can’t really say I’m sorry they lost a lot of members – including Kanjorski – who were effectively working against us on health care, gay rights, abortion rights, and so forth. I’m all for a big tent, of course. But the future is not with people who want to turn back the clock by 100 years or more, and I’d just as soon we not have to accommodate members on our side of the aisle who reflect that view.
I’ll always be grateful for the experience I gained in the summer of 1994, and I certainly am not happy at the prospect of "Congressman Lou Barletta". But I’m also reminded of the saying, "People get the government they deserve." In PA-11, I can tell you that like it or not, that’s exactly what they’ll get from Barletta. And in the long term, this is a chance for the Democrats to rebuild a majority that progressives can respect. Whether it includes a member from Northeast Pennsylvania really doesn’t matter. The 21st century will arrive there sooner or later, and it'll rejoin the Democratic fold when that happens.