by Emily Badger, photo by Tom Bamberger
Before the visitors arrive, their orange juice awaits them, already poured in glasses. The coffee has been brewed, the tea bags set out, along with the muffins, doughnuts, bagels and, because this is a gathering of Wisconsinites, the milk. Herb Kohl has personally paid for everything from the Senate’s catering service. “We called to get a tour of the White House, and they invited us to breakfast,” marvels one woman, a contented constituent who doesn’t seem to realize that every visitor gets invited to breakfast. This particular Wednesday morning in late October, there are families from Green Bay, Appleton and Sheboygan; a former Marine wounded in Iraq, members of the Sauk County chapter of Pheasants Forever and the CEO of the National Association of Tax Professionals.
Whatever the reason, if you’ve come to Washington to complain about your Medicare, take the kids to the Capitol, or promote a legislative bill, Herb Kohl’s office suggests you drop by Wednesday morning for a continental breakfast. The senator would very much like to meet you.
The weekly event is choreographed like a trunk show for valued customers. Guests are greeted by a beaming aide at the front desk and given a contact form that asks what they’re wearing – so staff can later match photos with the senator to the right mailing address. Aides are at hand to talk dairy pricing, Italian restaurant recommendations or even rebook hotels if anyone finds they’re in a seedier part of D.C.
Kohl, always the most inconspicuous attendee, at some point slips into the room, a 5-foot-7 septuagenarian with a shiny dome and a drab navy suit. The office is full of photos establishing his people skills: Kohl crouching amid a class of kindergartners, Kohl working the state fair outside Herb’s Superb Milk House, Kohl receiving a kiss on the forehead from a small boy in a twist on the politician-kisses-baby trope. Yet he is actually rather shy, asking questions instead of fielding them, chatting politely about sports and his favorite Wisconsin delis. Mostly, he looks like he doesn’t want to get in anyone’s way.
The office manager eventually escorts people to queue up for photos. Kohl takes his stance, arms at his side, before a panorama of American, Wisconsin and Senate flags. Then, once the encounters have been snapped – for digital posterity in company newsletters or on a glossy for those who want to frame it – everyone gets a Milwaukee Bucks pen on the way out the door.
So many constituents are in and out – fed, photographed and appreciated – in about half an hour, with not the least signal to keep the line moving or that the senator needs to be somewhere else soon. It is Herb Kohl’s signature style of customer service, a throwback to his days running the family’s Milwaukee food stores.
When Kohl rose from the latter career more than two decades ago, grocer seemed an odd qualification for U.S. senator. But as he sees it, the job is fundamentally the same: Now, he simply provides customer service on a much larger scale. Whether the problem is overripe produce or unpaid Social Security, people still want attention paid. As Kohl likes to say, “Each person is unique, each person has a story, and everyone wants to be listened to, respected and appreciated.”
It’s hard to imagine big-ego senators like Mitch McConnell or Joe Lieberman motivated by such aphorisms – or hosting weekly coffees. And a politician who actually takes money from people – something the independently wealthy Kohl prides himself on not doing – might have an image problem equating constituents with customers. In defining his job around the problems of people instead of the particulars of policy, Kohl eschews the Washington drama: the ideological wars, the brinksmanship, the battles for headlines and recognition.
His colleagues become political shorthand: McCain-Feingold for campaign finance, Boxer-Kerry for climate change, Rep. Bart Stupak for abortion restrictions. Kohl is barely comfortable having his name on a basketball arena, let alone a nationally divisive issue.
He is instead a solid Democrat, with all his A’s (the NAACP, Planned Parenthood) and F’s (the NRA, the John Birch Society) in the right places, but more a citizen legislator than elder statesman.
Even his D.C. senatorial office feels free of political intrigue. Back-room deals aren’t cut here because, literally, there are no back rooms. Kohl had the chance in 2006 to upgrade to a larger office. Two senators had retired, but both suites were too much like rabbit warrens. Kohl prefers his open setup, with few walls and doors. He has the only private office in it, and Lynn Becker, his longtime communications director, remembers its door closed just once. That was the day the FBI came to discuss Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. “And I think it was the FBI agents who closed the door,” Becker says. Otherwise, Kohl works with it wide open, quietly running what may be the premier customer service operation in the U.S. Senate.
*****
When Kohl’s immigrant parents, Max and Mary, opened their first shop beneath their apartment at Lincoln and Kinnickinnic avenues in the 1920s, they spoke so little English that customers had to point out their own cornflakes and make their own change. That the operation would grow into a nationwide department store that still bears their name is an archetypal only-in-America tale. There’s the hardworking father home for three meals a day, the reverence for public education, the money scraped together so the kids could buy war bonds at school.
At 11, Herb cut the ribbon on the store at 46th and Burleigh that would become Milwaukee’s first modern supermarket. It was self-service, had a separate bakery department and those electric-eye doors that are now a minimum amenity at grocery stores everywhere. Kohl’s Food Stores ultimately would achieve a near-mythic aura – as well as a 50 percent market share – one that expands further each time its old employees get together to reminisce.
Edie Mantel met Herb Kohl the day she interviewed to work for his family’s business in 1963. He had returned from Harvard Business School to run the food stores and had a standard, if odd, way of interrogating every prospective employee. “He went into ‘If something was three for a dollar, what would you charge a customer for one?’” Mantel, now 88, laughs. “He kept going on and on until he asked me something like, ‘If 13 were for two and a half dollars, what would you charge for one?’ I just thought, ‘This is nuts, I can’t do this in my head.’ ”
Kohl, who adopted the everyman-matters M.O. from his father, thought if each employee understood they’d gotten their job from a member of the family, they’d be more loyal. And he wanted people who could do math when cash registers couldn’t.
Employees loved the place. They had a credit union and health insurance. They were given 10 percent discounts at the department stores when the business expanded in 1962, and grocery coupons over the holidays they used to buy Christmas dinner. People stayed on for decades, many of them leaving only after the company was sold, and sold again, and their five weeks of vacation were cut down to one.
“We were all Kohlized – we all kind of thought the same way, believed in the same things,” says John Randall, who worked in corporate accounting. “Always keeping in mind productivity, efficiency, not spending to excess and, more importantly, serving the customer. Taking care of the customer was always number one.”
Kohl, who became president of the company, made unannounced rounds at odd hours, looking for meat counters and produce stands in imperfect display. He greeted part-time clerks by first name. When lines backed up, he bagged groceries himself – much to the horror of his store managers.
It is easy to imagine him to this day, now 75, an NBA team owner and a four-term U.S. senator, stopping to bag someone’s fish sticks if the stores still existed.
The family sold 80 percent of the business to the British American Tobacco Co. in 1972, and when BATUS took its option on the remaining stake six years later, Kohl left the management. The food stores, Max Kohl’s original passion, were separately sold to A&P in the early ’80s and began a slow decline, until the last ones closed in 2003.
Mantel still meets the first Wednesday of every month at Alioto’s with a group of women who worked for the family. And a half-dozen former store managers still play a weekly game of cards. In August 2008, a birthday party for a former employee turned into a Kohl’s reunion of 350 out at the airport Wyndham. It was typical over-the-top Herb Kohl generosity, a sit-down dinner with a silver Senate insignia box at every place setting – all for a group bound only by their shared work for the same grocery chain two decades earlier.
“It was a seminal experience in all our lives,” Kohl recalls. Which, if you weren’t there, seems a strange thing to say about a supermarket.
*****
Kohl did little for several years after leaving the company, mostly tinkering with investments. “He needed things to do,” says Bud Selig, the boy up the alley who played the opposing captain in every baseball game of Kohl’s childhood. “Knowing him as long as I did, he had so much talent and was such an active person, he had to be doing something.”
The Bucks weren’t it. Kohl bought the NBA team, for which he casually admits overpaying by a million or two, in 1985. Friends urged him to buy the club as a gift to himself on his 50th birthday. Managing the franchise full-time was never his plan.
Around the same time, Kohl, who’d briefly been state Democratic Party chair in the mid-’70s, began mulling a bid for Bob Kasten’s U.S. Senate seat, up in 1986. He met regularly with a few Wisconsin advisers and drove halfway down I-94 to a Kenosha restaurant to consult Chicago political strategist David Axelrod. “I told him what I tell most people who think they want to run for office,” says Axelrod, now a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “I discouraged him, because most people don’t know how hard it’s going to be.”
Kohl decided he didn’t want to appear to be exploiting the goodwill he’d recently won for “saving” the Bucks franchise. Two years later, a better opportunity arrived anyway – Bill Proxmire was retiring after 32 years in the Senate.
Kohl still hedged for months. His earlier advisers signed on to run campaigns for others in the Democratic primary: Axelrod for former Gov. Tony Earl, strategist Bill Dixon for Ed Garvey. When Kohl did enter the race, it was late spring, pretty last-minute for a September primary. “It was either do it, or go away,” he says.
“The way I identify people who are born to be political is to watch them go into a huge room,” says Bill Kraus, who was a Republican activist for decades and one of many observers who thought Kohl an unlikely fit. “Normal people like you and me will look around and see if we know anybody; we’ll go for someplace safe. The typical politician will go for the biggest group because they like people and want to meet as many as they can. I see none of that in Herb Kohl.”
His sister, Dolores, was at first shocked. “But it brought back walking through the stores with Herb, and he just had this common touch, this thread with people from Wisconsin,” she says. “I realized that you don’t remember the checker’s mother had a spleen operation a couple of weeks back if you don’t genuinely care about people. I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I see that.’ ”
It turned out Kohl could skip the most political parts of the job – fundraising, stumping, debating. He financed the bid out of his own pocket, spending a then-Wisconsin record of $7.5 million. And it was OK that he didn’t say much because his known values – and an army of former Kohl’s employees – spoke for him. Then there was that slogan: “Nobody’s senator but yours.”
It pre-empted the most obvious criticism, that Kohl was buying an election. Kraus still blames Kohl for destigmatizing big-money campaigns in a state of thrifty voters with famously Germanic values. Kohl may actually have been the only candidate who could have pulled this off, spending lavishly without offending anyone. Sure, he had millions, but from his demeanor to his dress clothes, you could tell he spent none of it on himself.
The result was a largely issueless election. Joel Rogers, Garvey’s policy director and a future MacArthur genius, wrote dozens of policy briefs: Ed Garvey on European integration, Ed Garvey on Third World debt relief, Ed Garvey on the state of black America. None of it mattered.
Kohl conveyed more in four words – at least more of what people wanted to hear – in tightly messaged ads he could afford to splash all over the airwaves.
“People vote for Ralph Nader because they believe he’s going to save the world. It’s real passionate, intense support, and legions of people for Garvey were really committed to the idea he was going to save the country,” Dixon says. “That is much, much different than people voting for Herb Kohl saying, ‘This guy is going to do all right by us.’ ”
Republican Susan Engeleiter more effectively attacked Kohl’s qualifications in the general election. He was losing a point a day in the polls the last two weeks of the campaign, and when Election Day arrived, he had no ground left to give.
“I knew I could lose, but I would have had options. It wasn’t the end of the world,” Kohl recalls. “I didn’t consider my life to be on the line.”
He won with 52 percent of the vote and celebrated at the Pfister Hotel with family that included Mary but not Max, who had died in 1981. Kohl thanked his supporters and then told his aides what he’s now been telling them at ribbon-cuttings and political rallies for 22 years: “Take me home.”
Still serving his first term in Washington, Kohl was one of the Judiciary Committee’s newest members when the first Bush administration nominated little-known New Hampshire Judge David Souter to the Supreme Court. In the prehearing rounds before Judiciary panelists, Souter said he hadn’t made up his mind about Roe v. Wade, the historic case legalizing abortion.
But Kohl got a phone call from a friend who knew a Souter colleague with explosive news. Souter was supposedly lying about Roe v. Wade. He thought the ruling should be overturned, and this guy – another New Hampshire jurist – had heard Souter say so and would give congressional testimony to that effect.
“I was thinking Herb Kohl, a freshman senator, is going to be the star of these hearings,” says Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who was then Kohl’s chief counsel. “If this became a critical part of the Souter nomination, it would have helped ensure that people thought of Kohl as dynamic, playing a big role, all the things you want your freshman senator to do.”
Kohl and Leibowitz flew to New Hampshire to meet the man in a restaurant in Manchester. Leibowitz left the two alone, and they spoke about an hour.
In the car on the way back to the Manchester airport, Kohl recounted the exchange. “I pretty much convinced him,” Kohl said, “that he shouldn’t come down and testify.”
Leibowitz was stunned. The whole point of the trip was to make sure the guy could and would testify. But Kohl wasn’t certain the jurist was quite as sure as he thought he was. And – more importantly – Kohl didn’t think the man had considered the implications for his own judicial career, that by testifying, he might take himself down alongside Souter.
No Beltway careerist would have thought that way. “A lot of members of Congress would have dragged this guy down for a combination of mixed motives, but partly their own ascension in Washington,” Leibowitz says. “And he just didn’t think that was the right thing to do.”
Kohl judged something unseen about Souter – that Souter’s own backers failed to recognize when they touted him as a “home run” for conservatives. Kohl voted to confirm him, despite the politics, because he thought the man eccentric but decent (he thought quite the opposite of Clarence Thomas, even before Anita Hill arrived). He couldn’t have known this much, but Souter turned out to be a rogue liberal on the bench, a poster child for conservative misjudgment.
And so Kohl wasn’t the star of those hearings, and that has never been his role since. He jokes that one of his best moments came 15 years later during Samuel Alito’s confirmation. The New York Times ran a story skewering the windbags on the
committee during the hearings (“But Enough About You, Judge; Let’s Hear What I Have to Say”). But Kohl wasn’t even mentioned in the story. He appeared only in the accompanying graph tallying the word count: Kohl said half as much as Joe Biden during his allotted questioning, and actually left Alito time to speak.
Kohl’s pride over that bar graph suggests his unusual way of measuring success. If someone is giving out recognition, he’ll take as little as he can. (“I remember Herb telling me once, ‘I’ll give money for somebody,’ ” his old friend Rick Majerus laughs, “ ‘but if I have to go to a dinner, I don’t want to give.’ ”) And if anyone is measuring verbosity – and someone is; Kohl uttered 23,107 words in the 110th Congress to fellow Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold’s 113,965 – he’d rather be tallied as a really good listener.
“When you introduce a bill, it’s hard to get him to give a speech at the same time you do – he just wants to insert it,” says Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. “I would encourage him to do more of that,” he adds of the speechifying, the elbow-throwing, the photogenic posturing. “But it’s just not his personality, and maybe he doesn’t feel comfortable doing it.”
Kohl has in every way never become of Washington, a rare achievement for a senator or congressional representative. Each day after work, he heads to the basement garage of the Hart building, where his 15-year-old Chevy Lumina is parked in the shadow of Arlen Specter’s Jaguar.
“He has never chosen to become part of Washington society, the Washington establishment,” says Jeff Miller, another former Kohl counsel who’s now a lobbyist for the NFL. “He barely considers himself a politician, much less a Washingtonian. He doesn’t want to be that. He wants to be a guy from Milwaukee.”
*****
The state he represents has never been one with its hand out for federal aid; most Wisconsin politicians shun earmarked legislation as a dirty trade too impure for them.
But to Kohl, earmarks are another kind of customer service. He also sits on the Appropriations Committee and had a hand in delivering 90 percent of the state’s earmark money in 2009. He has scored funds for a South Side community health clinic and a $5 million expansion of Marquette’s dental school. When General Motors scaled back its plant in Janesville, he snagged an earmark to retrain laid-off autoworkers. This is not just “a nice thing to do,” he says, but an obligatory part of his job.
“If I have the opportunity to do it, my goodness, to say I don’t want to do it for whatever reason – we are more careful about every one of those expenditures than many of the things you find in a budget that gets passed” in Washington, Kohl says. “There isn’t a dime we spend out of this office for things in Wisconsin that isn’t really important and that accomplishes very good things for people in our state.”
As he says this, Kohl is heading out of Milwaukee’s District 2 police station after discussing a community prosecution program he helped fund, securing about $50,000 per position to staff one full-time district attorney in each of the seven major police precincts.
“That’s why I’m always sensitive,” District Attorney John Chisholm later says, “to any sort of throwaway comment that ‘Oh, point out something that Herb Kohl has done for Milwaukee.’ If you care about felony drug prosecutors, if you care about domestic violence prosecutors, if you care about community prosecutors, I’m pointing you directly to an intervention that has occurred in the last five years on a consistent basis.”
Chisholm’s prosecutors do so much good, Kohl notes as he leaves the precinct and heads to Jake’s Delicatessen for lunch. His battered green Packers cap is waiting in the car, and he is wearing, as usual, a navy suit, though the blazer and slacks are slightly mismatched.
He walks in the door at Jake’s and makes the rounds, never introducing himself because everyone recognizes him, including the waitress who knows he’ll take half a Reuben with the other half going on a separate plate to his state director, JoAnne Anton.
A couple of retirees want to know if he’s read the entire health care bill. Kohl sympathizes with people suspicious of anything wholly supported by one party and shunned by the other. This didn’t used to be such a problem when he arrived in Washington two decades ago. From the point of view of a mild-mannered CEO who wants to quietly work everything out down the middle, the increasingly bitter partisanship in Washington is challenging for Kohl.
“There are probably some people who come to Washington wanting to become more successful,” he says over lunch, “more powerful, more well-recognized, whatever the word is. That leads them to say things they otherwise would not. You want to become noticed, so you throw bombs.”
He would rather do what’s next on the agenda in Milwaukee, a visit to the fifth grade at Golda Meir School. Kohl always loosens around kids, despite having none of his own. He comes back from Washington each spring to host banquets for the scholarship program he privately funds – it’s doled out more than $7 million since 1990 – for teachers and graduating seniors statewide. But there, too, he enjoys deflecting the spotlight from himself. (Former Bucks guard Charlie Bell chuckles at a contrasting memory: “I was joking with him about why he wasn’t having any of those town hall meetings over the summer, and he says, ‘No way! I don’t want to be yelled at!’ ”)
At Golda Meir, it’s a big day: A senator is coming, the third-graders are getting a visit from an armadillo, and it’s almost Thanksgiving break. Everyone is already at a fever pitch when Kohl delivers the line that kills with kids.
“Have you been to the Bradley Center?” he asks once they’ve settled on the gymnasium floor. And they shriek even louder when he hits the follow-up: “Would you like to be my guests?”
They have prepared for him tougher questions than he took at Jake’s. Does Kohl support sending more troops to Afghanistan? What about the public option for health care? He gives his anodyne party analysis about what causes climate change and why sick people need health care.
But he seems to recognize that, while it’s exciting for the children to ask him questions, listening to his answers is not much fun. So he flips the interaction.
“How many of you think you’ll have a great opportunity to do really good things with your life?” he asks, and every hand in the room shoots up.
“Awwwww man!That’s terrific! And how many of you think you’ll have a chance to go to college?”
And again, all hands go up.
“Man, that is sensational! And how many of you think you’ll be able to make Wisconsin a better place and are excited about contributing and having great lives?”
By this point, it’s clear the senator is so excited, the children should be, too. They shoot their hands up again, cheering now.
“Man, that is sogood!” Kohl tells them. “You made my day.”
They seem earnestly to believe this, and afterward, they all want Kohl’s autograph. Anton pulls principal Thomas Hanley aside as Kohl finishes signing notebooks.
“I’ll leave it to you,” she tells him, “to decide how you want to handle the senator’s offer.”
Hanley looks puzzled.
“The Bucks tickets,” Anton says.
“He was serious?”
Of course.
*****
Back in Washington in December, the Judiciary Committee is settling in for a three-hour executive business meeting. “May I just say something quickly here for the record?” Arizona Republican Jon Kyl interrupts Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy as he waits for the stragglers to show up. “In his effort to sweeten the bipartisan atmosphere, Senator Kohl was kind enough to send around to all of us some absolutely incredible chocolate. And I wanted to publicly thank him for that very nice act of kindness, which my staff proceeded to dive into.”
Everyone agrees that yes, the chocolates – from a variety of Wisconsin confectioners – really were fantastic, and that is about all they agree on for the rest of the meeting. Kohl chuckles about this later in his office. “I thought to myself, ‘We do that every year.’ I heard from a bunch of Republicans, we got notes from a bunch of them, which must mean that it goes on so little around here.”
This is a small inroad for Kohl, whose primary reputation around the Hill is just like back home: It’s not that everybody loves Herb Kohl, but there’s no one who doesn’t like him. Colleagues typically describe him as “quiet” and “nice.”
“I’ll bet he never has done anything to harm or hurt anybody behind their back,” admires Grassley, who says he’s accomplished more with Kohl while talking less to him than any other senator. Their staffs have been working together on several health care provisions, one that would mandate greater nursing home transparency – a priority of the Special Committee on Aging that Kohl chairs – and another that would bar pharmaceutical companies from paying off their generic competitors to delay the entrance of cheaper drugs onto the market. Both are sensible ideas and less-than-sweeping legislation.
It helps that Kohl almost always asks colleagues – Republican and Democratic – for cooperation in places where they can afford to give it. He’s not asking libertarians to get with him behind the public option. Rather, he’s looking for support to fund his school breakfast program. Plenty of non-sexy priorities get shot down in the Senate as a referendum on the politician backing them, not the substance of the bills. But not for Kohl.
Leibowitz has a favorite example: In 1998, Kohl agreed to let California Democrat Barbara Boxer sponsor an amendment he’d authored requiring child safety trigger locks be sold with all handguns. It was defeated 39-61. The next year, Kohl sponsored the bill again. It was approved, 78-20.
Apparently, 39 votes is the chocolate margin in the U.S. Senate, the measure of being the nice guy who is also perfectly happy to remove his name from a bill if someone else wants to puts theirs on it instead.
“When I do what comes naturally to me anyhow,” Kohl says, “it turns out to be good, because it makes people more inclined to work with me, to compromise with me, knowing full well they’ll get all the credit they need and want and deserve.”
Kohl’s colleagues praise him in a way that is almost political in itself. “He will advance the other guy before he advances himself, and that’s a rare quality in the Senate,” says Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. The implication, as with Grassley’s comment, is that many other senators do backstab, do put themselves first, don’t have humility. Says Feingold: “Some people feel compelled to speak at every single caucus several times. But I think people appreciate having a couple of quiet Midwesterners in there.” (Those same people might be surprised to know Feingold counts himself in that group.)
To compliment Kohl is, in a way, to damn the rest of the place. In what other setting does it count as high praise if someone doesn’t hijack a meeting or regularly undermine his colleagues? Kohl provides a virtuous benchmark against which the rest of the Senate looks pretty dysfunctional.
But virtue isn’t always the path to success. Hatch recalls a bill Kohl once asked him to support. “I looked at it, went back to him and said, ‘Herb, I really can’t support that.’ He said, ‘That’s all right Orrin, I wish I could get you, but I understand.’ He didn’t raise a fuss, didn’t pitch a fit.”
Hatch tells this story as an illustration of how nice – and nonpartisan – Kohl is. But another interpretation is that it’s easier to say ‘no’ to him.
“It’s a tradeoff,” says Paul Bock, Kohl’s longtime chief of staff who left the office last year. “You recognize, in debates that are highly contentious and there’s a lot of jockeying and fighting, those are going to be tougher for a nice guy to get his way. I always tell people, ‘Look, he’s [75] years old, he’s not going to change into something he’s not naturally comfortable with.’ ”
Bock occasionally suggested a get-tough tactic, threatening to, say, cut another’s appropriation, but Kohl wouldn’t bite. “The tradeoff is, people aren’t terribly afraid of you,” Bock admits.
Typically in Washington, power correlates with being disliked by at least someone. Kohl, though, doesn’t count power among the reasons he came here. He wants to be respected for his integrity, not feared.
“Senator Kohl is definitely respected in Washington,” says Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, a Wisconsin native who served as press secretary to Trent Lott. “But more people know his name than know what he’s done in the Capitol.”
Kohl doesn’t particularly like drawing attention to what he’s working on, but he also works more on issues that affect his constituents than nationwide causes. If you’re a Wisconsin farmer or meat processor, it’s a big deal that your state-inspected meat products can now be sold across state lines. If you’re a low-income Milwaukee teen, you can now hang out in one of 31 “safe places” as part of the Safe & Sound crime-reduction program. And if you have to put your mother in a nursing home, the federal government’s new five-star rating system will make it easier to find a good one.
“It’s a little bit like someone who’s painted a picture with a lot of little dots over the years,” Bock says. “If I were to step back and look, I see a pattern of people-focused issues.”
Such issues don’t make for big headlines, and The New Republic complained in 2005 that “It’s nearly impossible to recall an important battle that Kohl has ever led on his party’s behalf.” This also disappoints some politicos back home who think the state should produce crusaders in the tradition of Gaylord Nelson and Bob La Follette.
“My hope for activism and more progressive forceful leadership have not found a home in Herb Kohl, but he has always been that which he promised,” Dixon says. “He’s been an honest, dependable Democratic voice who has chosen not to be one of the leaders in the cacophony that comes out of Congress. That’s just him.”
*****
On the night of Jan. 19, Kohl turned his television to C-SPAN to discover he is not, in fact, the only politician who is nobody’s senator but yours.
“I’m Scott Brown,” the newest member of Congress was announcing in his victory speech capping the Massachusetts special election to replace Ted Kennedy. “I’m from Wrentham, I drive a truck, and I’m nobody’s senator but yours!”
“I’m going to sue this S.O.B.,” Kohl jokes with his staff a few days later. “Because I got that patented or copyrighted.”
“Maybe you just get residuals,” Becker suggests.
“He owes me now,” Kohl says, imagining the encounter when he meets his unlikely protégé. “I’ll say, ‘Young man, you’ll do better around here if you don’t take other people’s slogans.’ ”
Of course, he’s just kidding. Scott Brown will get a box of Wisconsin chocolates this Christmas just like everyone else. That, too, is customer service. The irony, though, is that the election of the latest Nobody’s Senator – a 41st Republican to break the Democrats’ supermajority – only tightens the bitter gridlock that makes Kohl such an oddity these days.
“I often think about him in the Senate, where there’s this arguing and mean-spiritedness going back and forth,” Dolores Kohl says. “And I’m guessing, he’s just not part of that.”
It’s kind of a lonely image: the one guy with manners in a room full of mudslingers. Kohl, though, would never put it that way. “One of the more offensive things in life is when people think they’re nicer than someone else,” says his close friend Chuck Pruitt, “and I don’t think he feels that in any respect.”
Kohl, in many ways, remains an outsider to the clubby culture of his institution, to the back-scratching fundraiser junkets, to the scrum vying to get on “Meet the Press.” All these years after arriving in Washington, he still regularly eats lunch in the basement cafeteria alone with his newspapers.
Kohl is simultaneously a people person and an introvert. That can take a toll. His staff describe his moments of solitude as the requisite recharging of a man who has – as both a CEO and a politician – handed over so much of himself to other people.
The image of the solitary man is heightened by the fact that he never married, a biographical quirk that has raised questions for some and adds to the enigma that is Herb Kohl. In younger interviews, he described his regret, and his parents’ disappointment, at not having a family of his own. But Al McGuire’s family had been like family to Kohl. He gave the legendary Marquette basketball coach’s eulogy, recalling, in McGuire’s words, “There are two kinds of people in this world. There are cloth-napkin kind of people and paper-napkin kind of people. You and me Herb, we’re paper-napkin kind of people.”
Sam Smith, a longtime NBA writer who has gotten to know Kohl over the years, suggests the Bucks are also like Kohl’s family. “I don’t know any other owner like that,” he says.
Kohl’s Senate aides describe his staff in similar terms, an unusual dynamic in a building where politicians frequently run through aides like a renewable commodity. Kohl’s new chief of staff began as a legislative assistant in the office. His legislative director was once in the mail room. His current chief counsel was a clerk before she left for law school, and came back again. Becker started as a volunteer on Kohl’s first campaign; her father, a supervisor in the meat and seafood departments, had worked in the food stores for 25 years.
Much of the family Kohl grew up with has long since moved out of Wisconsin. His brother Sidney lives in Florida, his brother Allen in California, and Dolores in Chicago. Sidney and Dolores have never even had the chance to vote for him. When Dolores talks about him, it’s hard to tell she’s describing a U.S. senator.
“He’s still basically the same Herb I’ve always known,” she says. “You don’t get the sense he thinks he’s very important. He still loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
Eaten, of course, with a paper napkin.
Emily Badger is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. Write to her at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
