Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd announced last week that he would step down next January from the post he assumed a decade ago, relief among many Democrats was palpable. Senators appreciate Byrd for his obsessive attention to their personal needs, but little else. Increasingly, he has seemed unable to control his flock. None of the Government's 13 appropriations bills came to a vote last year, forcing the adoption of an omnibus spending bill whose full content was not known to a single Senator; in February, Byrd's own campaign- finance bill could not make it through the Senate...
...Byrd's graceful exit gives the Democrats a chance to choose a new majority leader, one who may have to counter another four years of a Republican White House by setting a more vigorous style of leadership in Congress. Anticipating that Byrd would resign or be pushed aside, Senators Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, George Mitchell of Maine and J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana have been jockeying behind the scenes since last year...
...national television into a showcase for Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. Inouye's standing slipped further in January, when he was found to have sponsored an unnoticed proposal to give $8 million to build schools for North African Jews in France. Even without these setbacks, Inouye may be too Byrd-like for younger members. "Inouye is the direction you go in if you really want to play it safe, not rock the boat," says Norman Ornstein, resident Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute...
This will be the second try at the majority-leader post for Johnston. Elected to the Senate in 1972, Johnston, 55, made an aborted run against Byrd in 1986, when Democrats recaptured the Senate majority they had lost six years earlier. Johnston dropped out of the contest when he realized the awful truth: thanks to a secret ballot, Senators may pledge their troth in advance to more than one candidate. "I thought I had the votes earlier on," he recalls. "But they go like a covey of quail, all flying off in one direction. I saw the first one take...
...anything can happen in a race that has less in common with grown-up politics than a contest for student-council president, where the best leader can easily lose to the candidate who can organize the best mixers and loosen up hall passes. A former Senate aide points to Byrd's upset victory over the charismatic but inattentive Edward Kennedy for Democratic whip in 1971. Democrats talk national leadership, says the onetime aide, but they vote self-interest. "They want someone to manage their lives, make them look good," he says, "especially the ones with complicated social lives...