Seniors Make a Difference For Democrats

Discuss this on our boards!

Seniors Make a Difference For Democrats
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

November 6, 2002

"Leaning Left"

James Hall If the Democratic Party keeps control of the US Senate, or comes close to it, they'll owe a debt of gratitude to two senior statesmen who stepped forward with only days left in the political calendar to hold off charging Republican opponents. The untimely death of Senator Paul Wellstone and the untimely withdrawal of Senator Bob Torricelli under a cloud of ethics charges would likely have resulted in two Republican gains for the US Senate if not for the presence of septuagenarians Frank Lautenberg and Walter Mondale, proving that you're never too old to serve your party and your country.

Americans worship youth and the Latest New Thing, which is why every three or four years or so, the companies that make soap and toothpaste repackage the same old product in new wrappers to convince us that there's a new and improved item on the shelf. Republicans tried to sell Norm Coleman and Doug Forrester as the latest products, but it appears at this point that in New Jersey and perhaps in Minnesota the voters were not drawn to the new wrapper.

Indeed, politics is very much like selling the same old soap. The major political issues --- big government v. smaller, defense spending, balancing the budget, Social Security, Roe v. Wade, judicial activism or not --- keep coming up again and again and were as pertinent during Jimmy Carter's administration as they are today. That made it easy for Walter Mondale to pick up where he had left off and debate ways to fix Social Security, add prescription drugs to Medicare, and increase the minimum wage with Coleman.

And when New Jersey Republican Doug Forester wanted to talk about cleaning up polluted industrial sites using taxpayer money instead of taxes levied on polluters, he had no less than the architect of the original Superfund Act in Frank Lautenberg to debate the issue with.

For all their talk about a need for fresh faces, Republicans have relied for years on their senior statesmen to carry the party's banner, especially in the Senate. Bastions of Southern conservatism like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were leading their party in the Senate well into their 80s and 90s. 75 year-old Virginian John Warner remains an eminence grise there. Bob Dole gave up his Senate Majority Leader post at age 78 --- to run against Bill Clinton for president.

Then of course there's the case of a man whom (strangely enough) Republicans consider their best president ever, who ran for his second term against Mondale at the tender age of 72, a year younger than Mondale is now. In a famous debate, Reagan put the age issue to rest with his famous quip aimed at a fifty-something Mondale: "I won't hold my opponent's youth and inexperience against him" Perhaps that's what Mondale was thinking about when he accepted the Wellstone family's offer to run in the late senator's place just five days before the election.

Regardless how the election turns out, (as I write it's too close to call) Democrats owe Mondale and Lautenberg a debt of gratitude. Without these two, Republicans would have been able to expend much less money and energy on these two states, money and energy they could have used to influence other close races. And with their stature and experience, it's clear that a Senator Lautenberg and a Senator Mondale won't disgrace their states or their party in the United States Senate. Well, done, gentlemen. ***

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files