Word: congress
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After the moneymen, the next constituency to woo were the heavyweights who really control the Republican Party these days--the Governors, with their early-warning systems and their fund-raising networks and their serene distance from the party in Congress. One of the first to sign on was Montana's Marc Racicot, who had called in September 1997 out of the blue and told Bush that if he runs, "I'll be there." You're early, the Governor replied then, given the fact that he hadn't even announced whether he was running again for Governor. "Well," Racicot replied...
Before 1998, the Republican Governors had never coalesced as a power base, partly because there had never been such a critical mass, 32 of them in all. In contrast to the sinking Congress, the Governors were emerging as stars, centrist and practical CEOs who were busy fixing welfare and improving schools and cutting taxes while Gingrich fiddled. And they came to the table bearing gifts: their organizations, their financial backers and their endorsements. Unlike Clinton, Bush had never been a big mover among the other Governors, never an intellectual force or a policy genius. But they all knew him, many...
They also backed him when he decided to run for Congress in 1977, after only two years in town. (Yet George W. didn't want his father to campaign for him; he wanted to do it himself.) The decision to run violated a basic family tenet: First make your mark and your fortune, then run for office. Only those who knew him well had seen it coming. "He wasn't obsessed with politics, but it was always there," says Charles Younger, a Midland surgeon and longtime Bush jogging partner. A famously eligible bachelor, Bush had also surprised friends by courting...
Representative Henry Hyde, Republican of Illinois, has the most ambitious plan. It would ban sales of obscenely violent and explicitly sexual material to minors. Hyde also wants Congress to urge stores to make song lyrics available to parents before purchase. And he wants a study on the effects of music and video games on youth violence--though the Congressman seems to believe he knows what the findings would be. "There is a spiritual vacuum in these young people," he said last week, "that is filled with the culture of death and violence...
...they're House Representatives. To their bookkeepers, they're something else. Financial-disclosure forms, released last week, reveal a new side of some Congress members...