Photos by Regis Lefebure
Congressman David Obey, the famously irascible representative from northern Wisconsin, was not just serene; he was actually smiling. We were 10 floors above Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C., for a forum promoting his recently released autobiography. The gathering last fall was hosted by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank where Obey’s confidant and former chief of staff, Scott Lilly, was now a resident scholar. The televisions were tuned to MSNBC. The complimentary coffee was organic. Obey was back in the liberal bosom, all right, with a friendly crowd anxious to hear him speak.
Obey’s reputation with the left had, frankly, been taking a beating. He was getting nowhere trying to end “this misbegotten war,” as he described the Iraq conflict. He had suffered the indignity of being furtively video-recorded in a confrontation with an anti-war activist named Tina Richards. The six-minute exchange, with Obey castigating “idiot liberals,” promptly found its way onto YouTube, and Obey was roundly criticized for his treatment of Citizen Richards. Then he grabbed more headlines two months later after reportedly swearing at Ohio U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the far-fetched presidential candidate and maximal lefty, during a closed-door House Democratic Caucus meeting. “The Great Mount Obey rumbled to life,” declared the Capitol Hill paper Politico, with a front-page illustration of the congressman caricatured as a detonating stick of dynamite.
There was irony, and perhaps injustice, in the fact that Obey, who had been among the liberal avant-garde for decades, was now being portrayed as an equivocator, a stick-in-the mud, a little-c conservative. These criticisms soured the air as Obey assumed the platform in front of the crowd and began speaking ruminatively about how the modern media culture had changed the nature of his job, how floor debates had become increasingly more performance art than anything substantive. He recalled that an entire year had passed before he uttered his first words on the Appropriations Committee. And when he finally rose to speak, John Rooney, a former congressman from New York, quickly interjected, “Sit down you smart-ass young punk. What do you know?”
To which, Obey replied:“kiss my fanny, you senile, old goat. What do you know?”
Almost four decades into the fray, had the young punk himself become the old goat? Had he traded in his indefatigable progressive spirit en route to the top? As chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which decides how the federal government allocates discretionary spending, and as someone famed for his legislative capabilities, Obey was arguably the most powerful member in Congress next to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even when his party was not in power, Obey had found ways to run the inside track. “I think he’s a much more dominant figure in American politics than almost anybody recognizes,” says Lilly.
So why, his critics on the left have carped, hasn’t he accomplished more this term on issues like the Iraq War? The reality is that Obey’s power is circumscribed. He faces a president with a powerful veto. A minority party with the ability to filibuster. A war that is sucking up all the budget money, yet presents no easy path to withdrawal. Obey understands and even accepts these challenges. Indeed, he can display a bristling impatience with those who don’t understand his attempt to balance pragmatism and ideology, his veteran legislator’s sense of the best long-term strategies.
After all, Obey had reassumed the pinnacle of congressional power, placing him in position, probably for years to come, to effect change in the Capitol. But many of his side’s supporters were unwilling to take the long-suffering view. The unrest on the left, it seemed, could ultimately stymie Obey as much as anyone seated on the opposite side of the aisle.
“If a bunch of young members decide that Dave Obey has gotten too crotchety or too staid in his ways, they can throw him out,” says Bob Livingston, the former Republican House Speaker.
“He’s not invulnerable.”
Not quite. But as Republicans like Livingston learned, Obey could adroitly pull the strings of power even when Democrats were in the minority. How much tougher will it be to beat him now that he has the whip hand on a top House committee?
“They better pack a lunch,” Livingston warns Obey’s critics, “because it ain’t going to be easy. They’re going to know they are up against a very skilled senior legislator.”
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I first met Obey last spring for lunch in the dining room of the National Democratic Club. Two blocks from the House office buildings and its lordlier Republican counterpart, The Capitol Hill Club, the NDC digs could easily be mistaken for a tavern in Obey’s home town of Wausau, save for the Macanudos and small “Bush countdown clock” key chains being sold from a display case near the hostess stand. This is Obey’s favorite haunt, and his Washington socializing usually takes place here or at the Birchmere, an intimate music hall across the river in Virginia.
Obey wore his usual gray suit and red tie. His hair (liberal critics please note) was parted to the left, although a little wayward tuft drooped across his forehead. His trademark pair of No. 2 pencils poked out of his suit pocket, eraser side up. He ordered a gin and tonic with a slice of lemon and a sandwich. Then he leaned back in his chair, fiddled with his straw, and began telling the story of his life. He had finished writing his autobiography, Raising Hell for Justice: The Washington Battles of a Heartland Progressive,and seemed in a mood to look back.
His father, Obey writes, “was the only person in America to move to Oklahoma during the Great Depression to get a job.” So Obey is technically the native son of Okmulgee, Okla. Orville Obey soon returned the family back to Wisconsin and took up a job in the color quartz lab at 3M in Wausau. Orville, however, was never quite able to escape the aftershocks of the Depression, and the family constantly teetered on the edge of hardship. When Orville suffered paralysis in his arms after a botched emergency appendectomy, David writes that the experience “taught me at an early age what a tenuous grip most working families have on security.”
In third grade, young David was sent home the very first week for wearing jeans. It was only after his father explained to the principal how he couldn’t afford trousers for his son that the boy was permitted to return. Obey refers to the next two years as the worst in his life, with his father struggling to pay the mortgage on the family home and his parents fighting.
A breaking point arrived in the seventh grade, where Obey was failing everything but civics. A teacher named Sister Tecla had asked Obey a question in class one day, to which he was unresponsive. So she walked over to his desk and slapped him across the face. Stunned, Obey recoiled, and returned a blow to Sister Tecla’s jaw. He was ordered to another school the next year.
Such hard knocks can embitter some people and leave them apathetic to government and the democratic process. For others, it provides extra motivation to participate in politics.
“I don’t idolize government,” Obey says. “I just know what human nature is like. I know that left to their own devices, top dogs will grab every last scrap in the bowl, and government is one of the tools that average people need in order to keep the big boys honest, to keep them reasonably at bay, to knock the rough edges
off capitalism.”
In high school, he learned something about human nature observing the infamous U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. Obey had at first been a fan, impressed with McCarthy’s presence and command. Then he saw the senator speak at a Republican dinner at the Elks Club and found his hyena-like laugh and general display of demagoguery slightly unnerving. “I remember watching the Army-McCarthy hearings,” Obey writes, “always rooting for McCarthy. I was sure he would vindicate himself, but he never did. He just kept looking meaner and meaner.”
Meanwhile, Obey learned about the hell his favorite high school teacher went through at the hands of local McCarthyites. The teacher, Arthur Henderson, was a New Deal Democrat who had introduced Obey to Wisconsin progressivism, and had been besieged with “Bolshevik” charges that nearly cost him his teaching job. Obey was furious – and forever thereafter, a progressive.
At UW-Madison, he came under the tutelage of Ralph Huitt, the famed political science professor and former Senate aide to Lyndon Johnson. Huitt taught Obey that pragmatism and idealism are not mutually exclusive entities in politics or, for that matter, life. “He didn’t teach a course on political science as he thought it should be in theory,” Obey says, “He taught as he knew it was after years representing LBJ.”
Upon graduation, Obey was awarded a fellowship for a graduate program in Russian studies, but in order to claim it, the National Defense Education Act required him to sign a loyalty oath. The idea repulsed Obey; it stunk of McCarthyism. Earlier that year, Obey had passionately railed against loyalty oaths at the Young Democrats state convention in Fond du Lac, and this had won him a bit of a following.
“The idea that we must prove our loyalty to the country is BS,” Obey says today. “I assume that every American citizen is loyal unless you can prove otherwise. You don’t have a burden to prove you’re more patriotic than somebody else.”
Huitt counseled pragmatism. “Don’t be stupid, David,” he told his student. “You don’t have any money. Take the money, get your education, and you’ll be in a hell of a lot better position to influence your government on things like this than if you make a noble but dumb gesture.”
So Obey’s opening wedge into public service would require a slight moral concession. When he completed his fellowship, Huitt urged Obey to run for an open seat in the state legislature. Obey would win the race in 1962, the same year he married his wife Joan. He entered the State Assembly the following year at age 24 with the thought that his tenure would be short-lived and he would eventually return to academics. With that in mind, he began taking copious notes of his daily experiences with the thought they would one day serve as material for a doctoral dissertation – notes that were later helpful for his autobiography.
Rising from the back row of the chamber to issue his first remarks before the legislature, Obey laid into Assembly Speaker Paul Alfonsi, assailing him and his Republican cohorts for using excessively partisan tactics. Afterward, Alfonsi walked up to Obey, chastised him as “a cocky little son of a bitch,” and threatened war.
And so began the political career of David R. Obey, hell-raising Democrat in a legislature then ruled by Republicans. For the next few years, he took his lead from the likes of Bob Huber, a labor-oriented populist from West Allis, and Frank Nikolay,a fiery civil libertarian from Marathon County. But nobody influenced Obey as much as a no-frills legislator from Polk County named Harvey Dueholm, a retired farmer who battled cancer for the last two decades of his life, maintaining, through it all, a good sense of humor and an unadulterated, Will Rogers outlook. Dueholm had mentored Gaylord Nelson, who rose to governor and then U.S. senator, and who would come to be influential in Obey’s life as well.
Obey still looks fondly upon his time in the Assembly and says he was never happier. The body included just enough members to keep runaway egos in check, but not so many as in the House of Representatives, where it’s impossible to learn everyone’s name.
Obey recalls with particular affection the 1965 legislative session, when Democrats controlled the Assembly, the only time during his tenure in Madison when his party controlled either house. “We experienced plenty of disagreements,” he writes, “and we worked overtime to define our differences with the Republicans on taxes, education, transportation … but after we had done that we also found ways to reconcile those differences in order to do some great things. And sometimes we discovered we really didn’t disagree at all.”
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In 1969, a rare opportunity opened for the Democrats to seriously challenge for Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District seat. Richard Nixon had picked the incumbent, Rep. Melvin Laird, to serve as his Secretary of Defense. Obey convinced his party he was their best shot. And as the campaign unfolded, he looked well on his way, until a resolution came up for a vote in the State Assembly that seemed capable of derailing him. At UW-Oshkosh, some protesting students had stormed the office of the university’s president, provoking him to issue harsh and swift reprimands, and Republican legislators had seized upon this with a resolution endorsing the president’s decision. Once again, Obey faced the issue of pragmatism versus principle: He refused to sign the resolution unless a due process clause was included. It was not. And so Obey stood pat, despite the pleas of Democratic colleagues.
To the surprise of many, he would survive this, clinching the election with a solid margin of 4,000 votes. “Well I’ll be a son of a bitch,” was Gaylord Nelson’s firstresponse – according to Obey’s former District Director Jerry Madison – upon hearing the news. Laird had never won the district with less than 60 percent of the vote. And when Barry Goldwater had run for president in 1964, two of the four counties he carried in Wisconsin were from the 7th.
Adding to Obey’s accomplishment, he would be joining the U.S. Congress as its youngest member at age 30.
It was April Fools Day when Obey arrived in the House of Representatives, joining a downtrodden Democratic Caucus and a Congress at odds over the Vietnam War. Though opposed to the war, Obey had decided to give Nixon a year before he would vote for any measure prescribing an immediate pullout. “He wanted to implement things,” says Madison, “but he was smart enough to know it would take him a while.”
By mere serendipity, Obey landed a spot on the Appropriations Committee in his first term. For years, the committee had been in the clenched fists of a group of southern conservative Democrats. Viewing these chairmen as increasingly out of step with the party, progressives from the Northeast and Midwest, among them former Wisconsin Congressman Bob Kastenmeier, had begun challenging the Dixiecrat autocracy. As part of this effort, the Democratic Study Group had been formed, with the strategic purpose of trying to shift the balance of power in the party. Obey immediately gravitated to the DSG and its leader, Richard Bolling, a congressman from Missouri who Obey had learned about in Huitt’s political science classes. Bolling gravitated to Obey as well, and they soon engaged in regular back-chamber skull sessions after floor proceedings. Obey was immersing himself in the brass tacks and political arcana of Capitol Hill.
In 1974, Congress would welcome the class of so-called Watergate Babies, a swarm of freshman Democrats elected in the wake of Nixon’s resignation. Their arrival would shift the balance of power in Congress to the Democrats. With a few terms under his belt, Obey was in prime position to help lead the way.
The party leadership tapped him the following year to chair a task force that would propose new rules for how money in House office accounts could be used. Soon, the task force’s mission was expanded by Speaker Tip O’Neill to establish a general code of ethics. These helped establish new rules in the House, and their passage displeased many members on both sides of the aisle. Obey bore the brunt of the ire.
This ultimately stalled Obey’s political ascendancy, as O’Neill noted in his best-selling book, Man of the House.That reality played out in the fall of 1980, when Obey lost a close battle for chairmanship of the Budget Committee, largely because of bad blood he had stirred with certain anti-
reform Democrats. Undaunted, Obey continued to mark time on the Appropriations Committee while riveting his reputation as a legislative tour de force.
In 1994, just before Democrats would lose control of the House, Obey skipped over a few more senior members to win the Appropriations chairmanship. While his time at the helm would be brief, lasting less than a year, it would be effective. All the committee’s bills would be passed on time and signed into law. And even after he was forced to cede his gavel the following year, when Republicans took back control, Obey maintained his prevalence on the committee. According to Lilly, who served as Obey’s staff director at the time, it was Obey who exhorted President Bill Clinton to stand his ground when Speaker Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1995.
“Obey was the guy running the show,” says Lilly, “and he beat [the Republicans] so badly that he really controlled the appropriations process for the next five years. In minority, he was the key person.”
Obey was not always defiant. Bob Livingston, who succeeded Obey as Appropriations chair in 1995, fondly recalls his first day on the job. In the chairman’s office, he noticed a handwritten note on the desk. It was from Obey, directing him to a lower right drawer, where he found a bottle of J&B Scotch and another note from Obey which read: “Nobody should take over an empty office without proper furnishings.”
“I’ll never forget that,” Livingston says. “That was just the greatest gesture I could have imagined.”
That ability to connect informally to colleagues has served Obey well. On many evenings, he makes his way over to the DNC for Bombay tonics and chitchat. Aside from personal enjoyment, he views this as a necessary part of his job, greasing the skids of the legislative process.
“If you spend a half-hour just joshing with people and seeing what’s on their mind,” he says, “you’ve got a lot better chance of getting things done than if you just see them on the floor offering an amendment.”
“Some people can do the big speech,” says Will Stone, a former chief of staff for Obey, “some people can do the Rotary Club and slam it. … Dave will do all the things a speech coach would complain about: Put his hands in his hair. Clear his throat. From a scheduling point of view, I was more comfortable setting him up in small groups … because that’s where people got to see that phenomenal side of Dave. That’s where he does best.”
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Obey began seriously contemplating his autobiography about four years ago, he says, moved by former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson’s claim that his administration was the logical inheritor of the La Follette progressive tradition.
“When I heard him say that,” Obey recalls, “the first words that came to my mind were, ‘Like hell,” and that’s what I was initially thinking of calling the book. But the book is a hell of a lot more than a response to Tommy Thompson.”
And so, “Like hell” became Raising Hell.
You do hear a lot about hell when you follow David Obey, the hell he raised and the hell he has endured, or just the “hell” that naturally spices his conversations, the go-to intensifier of a man who is nothing if not intense.
While the Tina Richardses of the world might frustrate him, might get his arms flailing and the nervous tick in his eye a-twittering, Obey reserves his most naked contempt for those who he sees as anti-institution. Atop this list is Newt Gingrich, a man Obey all but abhors. He blames Gingrich and his generals for ushering in a whole new level of partisanship in Washington that still festers today. He takes similar issue with Gingrich-ish doppelgangers back at home.
“When you have the hard-heads take over like [former Assembly Speaker] John Gard,” Obey says, “they’ve ruined politics at the state level. They’ve been so zealously ideological. They must wake up every morning thinking of 50 ways to stick it to someone they disagree with instead of trying to figure out how to work with somebody or around somebody.”
Says Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner: “Obey realizes that the legislative process can be used by him as an instrument of change. When somebody has been around here as long as he has, you don’t want to destroy the institution you have chosen to serve in. You want to use the powers the institution has, and the rules the institution runs by, in order to accomplish goals. And he has been able to do that.”
Obey had hopes that George Bush’s proclamations of “compassionate conservatism” would lead to some abating of the tension on Capitol Hill. After the anthrax scare in late September 2001, Obey and Bill Young, a Republican congressman from Florida, went around to the various defense and intelligence agencies to inquire directly about what resources were needed to combat the threat of terrorism.
The two congressmen then outlined a budget, skimmed off as much junk as they thought possible, and requested a meeting with Bush to present it. When the meeting came, they were given only a few minutes to speak, and Obey says Bush’s disinterest was clear from the start. “Mr. President,” Obey said to Bush, “you’ve been blunt, and so I will be blunt as well. In the 30 years I have been coming down here, this is the first time I ever heard a president say his mind was closed before the subject was even opened.”
Ask Obey today about the 2004 presidential election and the anger instantly illumines his eyes.
“If John Kerry had answered the Swift Boaters the first two days they had that dumb ad on television,” he says, “if he handed them their heads like he should have, he would have been president now. That was the worst mistake made by any [candidate] I’ve seen in years.” Obey says he called the Kerry campaign at the time, imploring them to answer the charges immediately. “They underestimated the other side’s ability to get as low as you can,” he says.
In chafed disbelief over Kerry’s loss, Obey went to his running mate, former Sen. John Edwards, and told him that if was “crazy enough” to run in 2008, Obey was crazy enough to endorse him. Obey identified with Edwards’ story of humble origins and saw him as the presidential candidate most committed to helping working families.
“I don’t automatically trust people who have gone through life as life’s winners,” Obey says. “I think that losing and having to deal with problems – it can soften people, it can soften their heart at the same time it hardens their instincts.”
After 12 long years in the minority, there was no question that Obey would take the Appropriations chair for the second time in his career this past year.
“When you’re around him, he’s moving so fast and there’s so much going on that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on,” Lilly says. “But when you look at how big is his footprint, it’s huge, it’s just huge. And so much of it he doesn’t take credit for … he’s very good at letting people think things are their ideas.”
Obey shuffles between his congressional digs in the Rayburn House Office Building and his Appropriations digs at H-218 of the U.S. Capitol. The two times I visited with him at the latter, one could see what lay before him in the prodigious stacks of bounded congressional bills scattered about the reception area.
The previous Congress had left Obey with a near budget crisis, with nine out of 11 full appropriations bills uncompleted. Obey’s first order of business upon taking over was to streamline the process, working with his senatorial counterpart, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, to draft a continuing appropriations resolution and keep the trains running. The two were successful in pushing the bills through, and Obey found small ways to move money into health research and education initiatives.
“What he knows with numbers is astounding,” Stone says. “Not only does he know the numbers, he’s intellectualized them to what they mean and how they relate to things. If you change this one line in the budget … Dave would know would what that means to the Californian delegation and how many votes it will cost you.”
In December 2006, Obey got into a bit of a spat with Bono when the U2 singer was making his rounds through Congress to lobby for African AIDS and poverty relief. Customarily, Bono has been received with a sea of smiles and nods when he comes to the Capitol. But Obey challenged him to find the monies he desired in the federal budget. Afterward, Stone says, Bono’s political liaison called him up and said that Bono had never met resistance like that.
Says Stone: “If Dave ever did the cheeky campaign bumper stickers – and Dave does not do anything but Midwestern frugal – but if he ever did the cheeky campaign bumper stickers, they would say, “Honest, Brutally Honest.”
It’s not uncommon to see a constituent or lobbyist walk out of a meeting with Obey a little bowlegged. When a group of labor representatives came to lobby him not long ago, Obey scolded them for wasting theirtime on a member who was already on their side, and directed them to go after congressmen that weren’t.
Obey’s frankness can provoke misunderstandings. Last July, for example, he was criticized when he sought to keep some 32,000 proposed earmarks private until his staff had the opportunity to vet them. Obey contended it would completely gum up the process to do otherwise. Critics were aghast at the seeming hypocrisy of a self-styled reformer concealing earmarks. But Obey cried hogwash, suggesting his detractors keep the matter in better perspective.
“You had one earmark that [Alaska Rep.] Don Young got that was the ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ ” Obey says, “which isn’t even an appropriation earmark and all it did was take money away from other Alaska projects to pay for that one. He decided that community was more important than other communities in his district.
“And Duke Cunningham,” Obey continues, referring to the disgraced and incarcerated former congressman from California, “well, Cunningham was a goddamn crook. Do you think that it would have mattered what the rules are with earmarks? Do you think that would have reformed Duke Cunningham?”
At this point, Obey summons the words of Archy the Cockroach, the character in Don Marquis’ old newspaper columns. Next to Harvey Deuholm in Obey’s aphoristic repository is Archy. Obey paraphrases one of his sayings: Boss, what matters most isn’t what kind of system you have, it’s whatever you do with whatever system you happen to have.“To me,” says Obey, “it’s the results, it’s the impact on people that determines what’s ethical.”
Perhaps no issue could have more impact on people than health care, long a concern of Obey’s. “He probably would retire from congress if they ever pass universal health insurance,” says Madison.
But even modest domestic spending continues to take second place to Iraq. In the beginning of October, Obey announced he would offer no new supplemental spending unless there was a change of course in Iraq. He proposed a bill that would end combat operations in Iraq by January 2009 and came out in support of a controversial idea to install a war tax. As the year came to close, Obey was fighting tooth and nail with Republicans over the budget, threatening at one point to pull every earmark in order to bring it in line with President Bush’s spending limits. The criticisms now – from both Democrats and Republicans – was not that he was being too pragmatic, but too pugnacious.
In the end, however, Obey retreated, accepting a compromise on a big appropriations bill that clearly galled him. “The omnibus bill is totally inadequate to meet the long-term investment needs of the country,” he told the press in mid-December. “This is the best we can get given the fact that we do not have a White House that wants to put money anywhere but Iraq.’’
But the Bush administration is in its waning days. At age 69, after 39 years in Congress and 45 as an elected official, Obey intends to outlast yet another encumbrance to his vision of a government that protects average folks by knocking the rough edges off capitalism. He still has a passion about these issues,says Paul Carver, a senior Obey staffer. “He’s in a position where he might be able to do something about it and he’s going to use it.”
But the paradox of power in Washington is that even as you get the power, you often have to concede some of it. Perhaps no one has been more buffeted by the hurry-up-but-wait contradictions of Capitol Hill than David Obey.
“As the years go by, and Dave realizes he’s getting older, he seems to run harder and harder,” Carver says. “He is running faster and faster all the time.”
Daniel Libit, a former assistant editor for Milwaukee Magazine,is now a Washington D.C.-based freelancer. He may be reached via letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
