Tom Davis Calls It A Day

[y66]

Good story here about one of Virginia's brightest politicians.

After 14 years in Congress, Tom Davis is giving up his place in the bucket brigade. Someone else will have to put out the fire. If anyone wants to try.

 

For Republicans like Davis, these are gloomy times. While John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate energized the party after a long stretch of depressing developments, the most optimistic Republican strategists still expect further losses in Congress even if McCain wins the White House.

 

The way Davis sees it, the system has become dysfunctional. Bush has so destroyed the party’s public standing and Congress has become so infected with a win-at-all-costs mentality that there is no point in staying. “You know, the Cubs fans used to put the bags over their heads,” he told me when we met for eggs at Mickey’s Dining Car in St. Paul the first morning of the Republican National Convention. “That’s what I feel when you say you’re from Congress, because there are just so many things we’re not doing.”

 

This might be dismissed if it came from a fringe player on Capitol Hill, but for years Davis was one of the rising stars, a quintessential inside player who as part of the leadership managed to steer his party to election victories in even-numbered years while working with Democrats on legislation in odd-numbered years. He ran the House Republican campaign committee for two elections and later bypassed more senior congressmen to become chairman of the House Government Reform Committee until his party lost control of Congress. He spent a lifetime getting to this point and is now washing his hands of it, even as he foresees a fiscal reckoning after so much unbridled government spending, most recently to bail out Wall Street.

 

“When you get the majority, the leadership team sits around the table, and the first question the winners ask, sitting in this ornate room, is ‘How do we stay in the majority?’ ” he said. “Now the members, a lot of them, are willing to tackle these issues, but they elect leaders, and the leaders’ report card is: Do they get their members re-elected? You see what I’m saying? And the minority, by the way, sits in a little less ornate room, a little smaller room in the Capitol, and they say, ‘How do we get it back?’ And so for every issue it’s ‘Do we cooperate or do we try to embarrass them?’ Very few times they cooperate.”

 

As for Bush, Davis long ago lost faith. “He’s a disappointment,” Davis said. “How else do you say it?” In his view, Bush grew isolated and surrounded himself with people who made bad decisions. The president, he lamented, failed to effectively tackle a rising deficit, Medicare and Social Security. He rose to the occasion after terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, but not after Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast. “I would vote for him again against John Kerry; that’s not an issue,” Davis said. “But I’m disappointed just in terms of his stewardship. I wrote the Katrina report. Just the fact that he wasn’t down there the next day and he flew over it in Air Force One to get a view of it — that, to me, is not leadership.”

 

Davis is one of 26 Republicans who have chosen to retire from the House this year, many of them moderates like him, compared with 6 Democrats. “There’s no question we’re a dying breed,” said Representative Jim Ramstad of Minnesota, who is also giving up his seat.

[JoAnneM]

I wonder how many Republicans, especially in Congress, are just totally embarrassed by the Palin nomination.